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BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS VOLUME. 


I. 


PATRICIA KEMBALL. 


By MRS. E. LYNN LINTON. 

ISMIO. FINE CLOTH. 01.7 5. 


“ ‘ Patricia Kemball,’ by E. L5mn Linton, is the best 
novel of English life that we have seen since the 
‘ Middlemarch’ of George Eliot.” — Philada. Evening 
Bulletin. 

“The book has the first merit of a romance. It is 
interesting, and it improves as it goes on. ... Is per- 
haps the ablest novel published in London this year.” 
— London A thenceum. 

“ Patricia Kemball is removed from the common run 
of novels, and we are much mistaken if it does not 


land Mrs. Linton near the skirts of the author of 
‘Middlemarch.’” — Lloyd's Weekly. 

“ It is written in a very clear, lively and interesting 
style, with a pleasant effervescence of satire and epigram 
rising through it like the air-bells in champagne, and 
displays genuine humor as well as keen social observa- 
tion. The reader has the satisfaction of feeling that 
he is in communication w'ith a writer who has really 
something to say, and who knows how' to say it with 
point and spirit.” — London Saturday Review. 


:( 

■ \ 



' THE TRXJE HISTORY 

OF 

JOSHUA DAVIDSON. 

By MRS. E. LYNN LINTON. 

ISMO. EXTK^ CLOTH. 01. S5. 


“The book is written with great power, and its in- 
terest is simply entrancing.” — Boston Literary World. 

“ This is one of the most daring and clever pieces 
of work we have recently read. The humor is never 
w'ithout elevation, though it mercilessly transfixes 
whole classes, and the tone of a lofty earnestness is 
felt throughout.” — London Nonconformist. 


“A remarkable book, which will set readers think- 
ing. Perhaps it may set them working for the good of 
their fellow-men.” — London Graphic. 

“ The book is a work of remarkable ability, and has 
made its mark in England, as it will, doubtless, do in 
this country.” — Boston Evoiing Traveller. 


For sale by Booksellers generally, or will be sent by mail, postpaid, npon receipt of the price by 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., Publishers, 

715 and 717 MABILET ST., PHILADELPHIA* 


i 


THE ATONEMENT 

f ' 

I 


LEAM DUNDAS. 



Mrs. E. LYNN LINTON, 

AUTHOR OF “ PATRICIA KEMBALL,” “JOSHUA DAVIDSON,” Etc. 


ILLUSTRATED. 



PHILADELPHIA 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

I!8 7 6. 


I 





TZs 

'Lts? 











Exchange 
TJniv. of Arizona 

FEB 1 8 1941 


' ; 



' * 1 ' t 




7 


I 

CONTENTS. 


Chapter Page 

I. North Aston 5 

II. Who Lived There 8 

• III. Madame la Marquise de Montfort 14 

IV. Worth Doing 18 

V. At the Hill 26 

VI. For and Against 31 

VII. Mother and Daughter 34 

VIII. Only Frank 41 

IX. Las Cosas de Espana 48 

X. The Pomegranate Bud 51 

XL Among Pitfalls 57 

XII. Struck Down 63 

XIII. Under the New Law 68 

XIV. Unchangeable 74 

XV. Laying the Lines 78 

XVI. Madame’s Unjust Steward ^ 84 

XVII. What Must Come 91 

XVIII. Reckoning with Leam 94 

XIX. At Steel’s Corner 99 

XX. In her Mother’s Place 105 

XXL Changes 112 

XXII. Edgar Harrowby 117 

XXIII. On the Moor 123 

XXIV. The Child Fina 129 

XXV. Small Causes 135 

XXVI. The Green Yule 142 

XXVII. In the Balance 145 

XXVIII. Only a Dream 149 

XXIX. The Friend of the Future 156 

XXX. Maya — Delusion 161 

XXXI. By the Broad 166 

XXXII. Palmam qui non Meruit 171 

XXXIII. Our Marriage 178 

XXXIV. Is THIS Love? 182 

XXXV. Dunaston Castle 189 

XXXVI. In Letters of Fire 196 

XXXVII. Unworthy 203 

XXXVIII. Blotted Out 208 

XXXIX. Windy Brow 213 

XL. Lost and now Found 219 

XLI. In his Right Mind 226 

XLII. My Queen Still 229 

XLIII. On the Fell-Side 234 

XLIV. The Day of Rest 240 

iii 



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THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 

By MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF “ PATRICIA KEMBALL.’» 

Z, 


CHAPTER I. . 

NORTH ASTON. 

T O those who admired the kind of 
thing it was, North Aston was one 
of the loveliest places to be found in Eng- 
land. It was indeed an ideal bit of Eng- 
lish scenery, best described in its sum- 
mer aspect, when tfie golden meadows 
were rich with flowers and the odorous 
woods were kingdoms of unknown treas- 
ures full of the mystery of life and love- 
liness. In winter it was barren and des- 
olate enough, but in summer it was an 
Eden — a place to make the dwellers in 
towns and stony places traveling on the 
high-road that overlooked, but did not 
enter the valley, sorrowful for the one 
part and envious for the other — a place 
where it seemed only logical to expect a 
human nature void of passion, and a so- 
ciety in fitting harmony therewith. 

It had everything to perfect a land- 
scape. There was the clear trout-stream 
winding through the fields and woods, 
giving the sentiment of travel and a be- 
yond as it flowed through the home from 
some secret sources, then passed away 
to lands unknown. Two miles down, 
the valley suddenly straitened to a nar- 
row gorge, where the road had been 
made side by side with the river by cut- 
ting into the rocks that rose on either 
side, now cleft into rifts where the sun 
never shone and the white threads of 
falling water never ceased, now thrown 
forward in overhanging masses like great 
gray bones projecting from among the 
trees and ferns. 

Up the valley the high lands broaden- 
ed into a breezy moor, purple with heath 
and heather, peopled with bird and beast, 
whence could be seen — as things in a 
dream, perceived but not belonging — 
the spires of cities and the smoke of dis- 
tant railroads, the mansions of the great 
and the tall chimneys of factories; to 
the left the line of blue hills like a veil 
of vapor; to the right the shimmer of 


the sea like a belt of silver against the 
sky. Down below were the green pas- 
tures where herds of kine, sedate and 
ruminant, stood knee-deep in quiet pools 
or stood by the meadow gates lowing for 
the milking-pails. Fields of yellowing 
grain were starred with blood-red pop- 
pies and ox-eye daisies, purple cranesbill 
and the shining disks of marigold — beau- 
tiful to sight if unprofitable for husband- 
ry ; the hedges were sweet with roses and 
woodbine in the summer, bright with 
berries in the autumn ; stately forest trees, 
like lords of the land, overshadowed field 
and fence at intervals; and more rare 
flowers grew about North Aston than 
elsewhere in England. In like manner 
more rare birds and insects were to be 
found here than elsewhere, and the quiet 
little village only wanted its local Gilbert 
White to be rendered as famous as was 
ever Selborne. But the chief pride of 
the place was the old ruined castle of 
Dunaston on the heights commanding 
the gorge. Originally one of the strong- 
holds of the county, it was now a mere 
ruin abandoned to tradition and decay. 
“The duke’’ to whom it belonged cared 
for nothing that did not bring him ab- 
solute profit or its equivalent in pleasure. 
He kept his modern shooting-box on the 
moor weather-tight and well provided, 
but he let the grand old castle crumble 
year by year and stone by stone till little 
beyond fragments of the outer walls was 
now left standing; and soon there would 
not be enough even of these to shelter the 
ghost that still lived there. 

For of course the castle was haunted : 
how should it not be ? The young bride 
of low degree, whom the cruel lady- 
mother had done to death three hundred 
years ago in the good old way of walling 
up alive in one of the upper dungeons, 
was to be seen at times flitting through 
the ruined arches and across the grass- 
grown court, wringing her hands in the 
moonlight, wailing shrilly in the storm — 

5 


6 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNE AS. 


an evil omen enough to whomsoever it 
befell, for how many had not seen it and 
suffered in consequence ? It would have 
been safer for a man to deny the story 
of Lot’s wife, or that the sun stood still 
in the Valley of Ajalon, than to cast 
doubt on the ghost of Dunaston. He 
who should so deny it might never hope 
to hold up his head again in the place, 
nor to shake off to his dying day the 
name of atheist, and consequent repu- 
tation of an evil-doer. The Dunaston 
ghost was the fetish of the place; and 
fetishes are sacred. 

The village set in the midst of this 
lovely, sleepy scenery was little better 
than a hamlet, and had no more com- 
mercial conveniences. But as all the 
land was owned by one or two large 
proprietors who would not sell for build- 
ing purposes, and who would have con- ^ 
sidered the place defiled had a mill or a 
manufactory risen within cannon-range 
of their preserves, the villagers were 
bound to accept What was given to them, 
and to make no complaints of what they 
could not alter. The market-town of 
Sherrington was full nine miles away; 
the roads were bad, and North Aston 
was on the way to nowhere ; trade there 
was none ; movement there was none ; 
but it was a lovely place to look at — and 
the aesthetics have their uses. 

All the same, if it was such a place as 
poets love to write of and artists to de- 
lineate, it was one also where the poor, 
stagnating in mind and fortune, live, 
toil and die, very little removed from 
the beasts they pasture, and where the 
wives and daughters of the resident gen- 
try, beating themselves like birds against 
the wires of their cages, spend half their 
lives in bewailing the dullness of the 
other half. 

There was the village smithy, where 
they discussed the local news and ham- 
mered out clumsy shoes that lamed the 
horses ; the village mill, where the best 
local business was done, bad enough 
when at the best ; and the one general 
shop which sold everything in a way, 
and that a poor one, but which was con- 
sidered sufficiently good for the villagers 
by the gentry, who got their grocery from 


Piccadilly and their millinery from Bond 
street; and there was the one beershop, 
the supervision over which was strict and 
the hour of closing early, with repeated 
threats from the rector, as senior magis- 
trate, of the loss of license should there 
be too much noise or any drunkenness. 
Indeed, the need of the “ Wellington ” 
was scarcely seen at all by the gentry, 
who laid down their pipes of wine dis- 
creetly, and let their barrels of beer mel- 
low in their ample cellars till they be- 
came fit drink .for tiie gods. There were 
the stately mansions of the few families 
constituting the local aristocracy stand- 
ing on the slopes in favored places, turn- 
ed to the sun and sheltered from the 
wind ; and in the bottom, among the 
swamps and drainage, a clustered hand- 
ful of ill-ventilated, ill-constructed cot- 
tages, mostly picturesque and all unser- 
viceable — the thatched roofs, brown and 
mossy, letting in the rain ; the rustic 
porches, which had been given by the 
landlords to look pretty and make a pic- 
ture, with ivy and creepers running up 
the trellis, harboring insects and mil- 
dew ; the small lozenge-paned windows 
that did not open, keeping the rooms 
close and foul, — all artistic and un- 
healthy, lovely to look at and bad to 
live in. 

But it made a pleasant picture for the 
great people to admire from the windows 
of their spacious rooms, and the girls 
liked to sketch the “bits.” WHien the 
miller, one Jonathan Dobson, got leave 
to slate his roof in place of the rotten old 
thatch, and so by degrees transformed 
his picturesque, rustic fever-trap into a 
square, ugly, comfortable little dwelling, 
there was quite a commotion at the Hall 
where the Harrowbys lived. The thatch- 
ed, ivy-grown cottage had “composed” 
in the most perfect manner from their 
windows, and they regarded the slated, 
ugly, comfortable little dwelling as in a 
manner an infringement on their rights, 
and a piece of impertinence from the 
miller to his superiors. 

North Aston was a village which 
might stand as the model of superior 
control. It had neither village rowdyism 
nor village immorality, and knew as lit- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


7 


lie of religious dissent as of political in- 
dependence. Even the blacksmith was 
a decent fellow who went to church with 
the rest, and the very tailor was a good 
conservative, and in no wise tainted with 
free thought. No mute inglorious Milton 
had ever questioned of fate, free-will or 
the sanctity of marriage at the smithy 
forum, and no village Hampden had 
been known to hold treasonable dis- 
courses concerning the rights of man or 
the wrongs of the poor at the alehouse 
on the green. No one thereabouts had 
inconvenient aspirations or nourished 
subversive discontents ; and since the 
year 1817, when a godless ruffian, who 
had returned from the wars a worse man 
than he went into them, had murdered 
his sweetheart for jealousy in Steel’s 
Wood, not a crime beyond the pettiest 
form of petty larceny or a scolding match 
between two shrews had sullied the simple 
annals of the place. It was as much the 
perfection of rustic order as of rustic 
beauty — a little community of ignorant, 
unambitious men and women strangled 
in the grasp of superiority. They had 
not energy enough to be even vicious, 
certainly not energy enough to be dis- 
contented, but accepted their pinched 
and deadened lives as of the unalterable 
ordination of Providence, thinking it hard 
sometimes when work was slack and food 
scarce, but comforting themselves with 
texts bearing on patience and the Lord’s 
will. They were proud, too, of their lo- 
cal aristocracy, and accepted them as 
superior beings whom it was only right 
and righteous should be endowed better 
than themselves, holding it part of their 
religion to pay them worshipful obedi- 
ence, and to keep the tenth command- 
ment when they contrasted circumstances 
and conditions. 

Of this small community the rector was 
naturally the immediate lord and head. 
To be sure, the real lord of the manor 
was the duke, to whom the whole of the 
land belonged with few exceptions ; but 
the duke was like the czar to the Rus- 
sian peasant, too far off for human needs, 
and for all practical purposes the rector 
held them in leash. Domination was part 
of his prerogative, and he was a man who 


did not disdain prerogatives. The liv- 
ing was worth about a thousand a year, 
and the population of the parish was not 
more than three hundred souls, all told. 
They were precious plants in the eccle- 
siastical vineyard as times go, when 
many a man is paid perhaps not one- 
third that sum for cultivating twenty times 
as jnany. It would have argued bad 
husbandry if they had not been kept 
well pruned, if not fruitful, at such a cost 
to the clerical treasury. 

The rector, however, was neither very 
solicitous nor very sanguine about his 
vineyard. He took his income as his 
right, and he gave his services as a grace 
subject only to the control of his dio- 
cesan ; but he thought the souls in his 
charge would be neither better nor worse 
for the cessation of his ministrations, hold- 
ing them as too wooden on the one side 
and too brutish on the other to be npch 
improved by anything man could say. 
He had the gentleman’s contempt for his 
inferiors, and the comparatively educated 
man’s scorn of crass ignorance. Chris- 
tian as he was, he clung to his own in- 
terpretation ot the “many mansions,’’ 
which he held to be the allotment of 
celestial lodgings, first floor or basement, 
according to present conditions, haugh- 
tily disclaiming the doctrine of equality 
even in Paradise, and often saying, “Do 
you think such a man as Jonathan Dob- 
son and I can be equals ?’’ 

Good as his pay was, he was not in- 
clined to think his lot as the sleepy 
pruner of these sapless straggling plants 
too enviable, and could never be brought 
to confess that his lines had fallen in 
pleasant places. And indeed it was one 
of the deadest, dullest livings to be found 
within the four seas — one of tho^e plabid, 
stagnant pools which the great waves 
of progress and commerce have left un- 
disturbed, and where the hand of time 
stands where it stood fifty years ago. 
True, there were such modern innova- 
tions as a foot-post who did his eighteen 
miles a day from and to Sherrington, the 
market-town, and whose business was 
almost wholly with the gentry ; and a 
railway station at Aston Bar, eight miles 
off. But the echoes of the world without 


8 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


that came to North Aston by these means 
were very few and faint, and the life that 
drifted there dbwn into eternity was life 
of the least eventful kind known to man. 

The place contained but five families 
of position, without any of those inde- 
terminate quantities, that intermediary 
fringe connecting the high and low 
together, found in large communities. 
There had once been a person of this 
kind, a certain Miss Snelling, a retired 
milliner, always called “ poor Miss Snell- 
ing” by the ladies when they spoke of 
her. Poor Miss Snelling had of course 
never been admitted into anything like 
equality by the great people, but each 
house had made it a point of Christian 
charity to send her a bunch pf grapes in 
the season, and the ladies asked her up 
once in the year to afternoon tea when 
no one else was there, and they thought 
they might as well do their duty and get 
it over. As she had been a humble and 
grateful kind of person, who never forgot 
her shop manners of deferential obse- 
quiousness, she had been the more 
readily recognized as a kind of inferior 
sister in the Lord; and because she 
made no efforts to assert her claims to 
a common humanity, but was willing to 
be treated as a worm if they were so 
minded, she slipped into a position re- 
sembling that of a petted lady’s-maid, 
sometimes patronized, sometimes snub- 
bed, but not suffered to decline the one or 
to resent the other method of recognition 
made according to the mood of her social 
superiors. 

But Miss Snelling was dead now, poor 
soul ! and her pretty little cottage, mark- 
ed ” Lion Hut” by the ordnance survey- 
ors, but called “Lionnet” by the people 
thereabouts, was empty, and likely to 
remain so. It was the property of Mr. 
Dundas of Andalusia Cottage, but, pret- 
ty and enticing as it was, no candidate 
for its tenancy had yet come forward, 
and Lion net was the one sole vacant 
habitation, and the one sole habitation 
of the second class, to be found in the 
district. 

So that the place contained in reality 
but five families of position, as has been 
said, not counting the duke when he 


came to the moor in the shooting sea- 
son, nor the various magnates to be 
found at the distance of twelve or thir- 
teen miles. 

These five families were — the rector 
and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Birkett, with 
their only daughter, Adelaide ; the Har- 
rowbys of the Hill — Mrs. Harrowby 
quite recently a widow, with three daugh- 
ters and two sons, of whom Edgar, the 
elder, was at present with his regiment 
in India, and Francis, the younger, prac- 
ticing at the bar in London ; Dr. and 
Mrs. Corfield, and their son Alick, at 
Steel’s Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Dundas, 
with their little daughter Learn, at An- 
dalusia Cottage ; and the Fairbairns of 
the Limes — a large family of boys and 
girls, six of a sort, ranging from a young 
man, Cyril, at college, to a baby in the 
cradle. These made up the gentry of 
North Aston — at the best a small society 
of major gods in their leafy Olympus, 
and one that promised but few elements 
for dramatic story. 


CHAPTER II. • 

WHO LIVED THERE. 

There was nothing very remarkable 
about these people. The rector, a hand- 
some, irresponsible kind of gentleman, 
with a fine figure, a high nose and a 
small head — who looked fitter to have 
been the colonel of a crack regiment 
than the priest of a church founded by 
a handful of Jewish communists — had 
taken orders because North Aston was 
a family living, and it would have been 
flying ih the face of Providence to refuse 
the bread already buttered for him. His 
life had been, in consequence, the life 
of a man who, having failed his natural 
vocation, has never reconciled himself 
to that which he has undertaken per 
force. He had done his duty in a per- 
functory and spiritless way, satisfied 
with peace and never seeking after im- 
provement. He had a profound con- 
tempt for the poor, and considered them 
hopelessly degraded ; but at the same 
time he held that they, the many, must 
be kept degraded for the good of us, the 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


9 


refined few. “ Society wants these igno- 
rant wretches groping in dirt and dark- 
ness,” he used to say with his martial 
air. ” The world has never yet got on 
without its helots, and never will ; and 
they are only fools or knaves who seek 
to abolish them.” 

Yet he was not unpopular in the place 
where he drew his ten hundred a year, 
and left his three hundred souls to strug- 
gle to the light as they best could. On 
the days when he was free from gout 
he spoke to his ragged sheep with the 
good-natured familiarity of a high-hand- 
ed gentleman condescending to his in- 
feriors ; but when his ’twenty-seven port 
played tricks with his blood, then there 
was a general uncorking of the vials of 
wrath which made his presence a ser- 
vice of danger rather than of joy. He 
had uncorked a good many in his day, 
and had the reputation of being a ‘‘tight 
hand,” whom nine times out of ten it 
was better to avoid than to meet. The 
truth was, he had fretted greatly in his 
time at his uncongenial lot in being 
bound for life to the confee of North 
Aston, for even nepotism could not pro- 
mote to ecclesiastical honors a man with 
a heltd so narrow and a temper of mind 
so martial as his ; but he was quieter 
now at sixty years of age, having grad- 
ually subsided into that kind of lazy ac- 
quiescence which is born of habit and 
diminished energies — the optimism of 
indolence and an enlarged waist. 

His wife, who was his second venture 
in the matrimonial lottery, was a placid 
woman of good family — sweet-tempered, 
inactive, ruled by her servants, and. in- 
variably five minutes too late. ‘The peo- 
ple, however,, liked her, for though she 
seldom visited or spoke to them, she was 
pleasant when the chance came ; and 
the servants at the rectory did not stint 
the broken meat. Their daughter Ade- 
laide was a pretty, well-bred girl of about 
twenty, with straw-colored hair, light- 
blue eyes, and a skin of the traditional 
strawberries and cream — a girl of soft 
manners and determined purpose, whose 
gloves of velvet, triple pile, covered hands 
of steel tougher than Bessemer’s. 

Mrs. Harrowby of the Hill was the 


British matron as found in country places, 
narrow, strict, innocent of the real world 
in which she lived. Her standing sor- 
row was the still unmarried condition of 
her three daughters, whose non-success 
in going off she attributed, not unreason- 
ably, to the departed Mr. Harrowby. He 
had been one of those men with large 
patriarchal proclivities and an aversion 
to change, who like to keep their chil- 
dren still children to the end, and who 
hold themselves personally aggrieved 
when the young' people begin to cast 
about for stray straws fit for nest-build- 
ing on their own account. He used to 
look at his three girls with a kind of 
Turkish spirit of domination mixed up 
with his English pride of paternity, say- 
ing half blusteringly, half affectionately, 
‘‘ I would knock any man down who 
dared to ask me for one of them !” his 
coat-tails over his arms, his back to the 
fire, and his bull-dog face flushed with 
the warmth of his place and his feel- 
ings combined. Thus, by keeping them 
at home and shutting the house - door 
against probable aspirants, he had so 
effectually prevented all chances of mar- 
riage while there was time that now it 
seemed scarcely likely the young ladies 
would be sought for at all, seeing that 
they had but small portions, were lean 
and faded, and held the restricted views 
of life belonging to virtuous country 
maidens over thirty, to whom tobacco 
is a vice? and whist for five-shilling points 
and a guinea on the rubber a sin almost 
as heinous as the advocacy of crema- 
tion ; to whom races are synonyms with 
iniquity, and billiards at a public table 
the ultimate to which low-bred immoral- 
ity can go ; elder sisters who caU their 
brothers of five-and-twenty ‘‘ boys,” and 
believe that they live in London and In- 
dia the lives of little girls at school. The 
youngest of the three, however. Miss 
Josephine Harrowby, was by no means 
so rigid as her sisters. She was plumper 
in body as well as softer in disposition, 
and often laid herself open to the re- 
bukes of the elder two by the habit she 
had of sighing and her absurd love of 
babies. 

Then there was Dr. Corfield of Steel’s 


10 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


Corner — “old Dr. Corfield,” as he was 
always called, though he was but fifty 
at the present time. He had long given 
up his professional practice, and now 
passed his days in making chemical ex- 
periments, devoting himself especially to 
the study of poisons, of which he had 
an extraordinary collection — a man 
bound up in facts which he cared only 
to collect, never to group ; to analyze, 
not to synthesize. Nevertheless, he was 
kind-hearted though unsocial, and trust- 
worthy, because so taciturn as almost to 
justify the theory of the Mute Man ; al- 
ways ready to do his best in cases of 
emergency and before the doctor from 
Sherrington could be brought. Else, as 
has been said, he never now practiced 
the profession he had studied more as a 
science than a profession, and which his 
wife’s fortune had rendered unneces- 
sary. 

This wife of his, “Sarah Corfield ’’ to 
her friends, was a shrewd, bustling, en- 
ergetic little person of spontaneous ac- 
tivities, with bright brown eyes and a 
sharp nose, fond of managing her neigh- 
bors’ affairs, and great at giving gratu- 
itous advice. She had skimmed the 
surface of many pursuits in her day,, 
from homoeopathy to cooking, and from 
spiritualism to millinery, with excursions 
into art and literature by the way not 
quite so successful as the rest. There- 
fore she took it on herself to advise her 
more ignorant sisters on all things under 
heaven and on earth, with an accent of 
certainty not without its value. She was 
at once the torment and the salvation 
of the North Aston poor, being the only 
person who looked after them practical- 
ly, who sent runagate little ones to school, 
insisted on household cleanliness, and 
fought against open ditches and typhoid 
fever. The women dreaded her worse 
than the plague when they saw her come 
down the hill in her little basket car- 
riage, with a supply of tracts and flan- 
nel at her feet, but they had it to do ; 
and as she administered her medicine 
in syrup, and donated while she scolded, 
they were fain to accept the one for the 
sake of the other, and to conceal their 
wry faces under a mask of gratitude. 


But shrewd as she was in the ordinary 
affairs of life, in one thing she was as 
foolish as others; and her maternal in- 
stinct overpowered her good sense quite 
as much as it overpowers the good sense 
of women whose foreheads are narrow- 
er and whose noses are blunter than hers. 
Her son was the apple of her eyes, the 
crown of her treasures, the living shrine 
before which she poured out her heart in 
unbounded devotion. To keep him what 
she called pure — that is, ignorant of the 
world, and therefore unable to avoid its 
dangers or to use its opportunities when 
the time came for him to do both — she 
had kept him closely tied to her apron- 
string all through his boyhood, and now 
in his young manhood of twenty years 
he was tied there still. She held the ab- 
solute equality of the sexes in all things, 
save granting greater strength of muscle 
to the inferior, and claiming higher moral 
perceptions for the superior; and she 
carried out her principles, not by en- 
larging the boundaries of woman’s place, 
but by dwarfing that of man’s. She saw 
no reason, she said, why a h^y should 
not be reared on exactly the same moral 
lines as a girl, and could not be brought 
to confess a sex in virtue. Whaf was 
good for the one was absolutely good for 
the other, and she would concede no lib- 
erties to the one which the other might 
not share. 

As her husband never knew how time 
or history went so long as he might be 
left in peace in the laboratory with his 
experiments, she had it all her own way 
with Alick ; and Dr. Corfield congratu- 
lated himself on the possession of a wife 
so clever that she could live his life as 
well as her own, and fulfill their joint 
duties creditably. 

The result was a tall, large, raw-boned, 
awkward young man who knew all man- 
ner of useless things, and none that could 
be turned to practical account — a young 
man whose painful shyness, innocent 
ingenuousness, homely features and un- 
gainly manners made him the butt of 
the young people whenever he appeared 
among them. But his mother loved him 
with a blindness of affection that saw no 
demerit anywhere ; and he loved her 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


II 


with a simplicity of reverence that was, 
however, sometimes sorely tried when 
she drew those apron-strings of hers 
I tighter than the young fellow liked, and 
: insisted on treating him as a child when 
I he felt the strength of his boyhood stir- 
ring powerfully within, and on holding 
him close as a girl when the freer in- 
stincts of the fledgling man would natu- 
rally have driven him farther afield. She 
never saw that she galled him. He car- 
ried the sacrifice of himself and his in- 
stincts of freedom as his offering of grat- 
itude and love, and bore his- chagrins, 
which were not light, with the dignity 
of patience and the cheerfulness of cou- 
rage. In some things the most trans- 
parent, Alick Corfield was in others the 
most obscure of all now living at North 
Aston. Every one thought him weighed 
and measured and fathomed to the bot- 
tom, but there was one whole side of his 
nature entirely misunderstood, and even 
his mother did not suspect the fund of 
poetry and passionate chivalry that lay 
like fruit in blossom in his heart. 

The Fairbairns at the Limes were just 
a healthy, open-air, breezy set of folks, 
taking life as a perpetual holiday, where 
the sun was ever at noon and the tide at 
its height, holding the faith that what- 
ever is, is right, and that people who 
complain of their portions are either 
weak or wicked, or may be both ; that 
this is the best of all possible worlds to 
those who know how to live in it ; and 
that we have but to keep out of debt, 
take plenty of exercise, and tub vigor- 
ously to make all things come square at 
the end. What else, indeed, should be 
the philosophy of folks married happily, 
with abundance of money, faultless di- 
gestions, and a large family of boys and 
girls, bright, brave and handsome ? — 
folks whose velvet coats had no seamy 
sides, whose family cupboards held no 
concealed skeletons, and whose silken 
ropes were free from frays and knots. 
What life was to the Fairbairns they 
assumed it ought to be to every one else , 
and, because they were exceptionally 
favorites of Fortune in their own per- 
sons, maintained that it is in the power 
of every one who chooses to grasp the 


slippery wheel and turn the golden 
spoke uppermost. If any one failed, 
then had he not deserved to succeed, 
for success follows merit as surely as 
light follows the sun, and the doctrine 
of ill-luck or undeserved mischance was 
all moonshine. Thus, as virtue is always 
rewarded, and it is vice alone that gets 
put in the pillory, the poor, pitiful tjieo- 
rist on elemental rights and the justice 
of apportionment only wastes his time 
when he questions the inevitable. It 
was a comfortable doctrine, looked at 
from their breezy heights, but it was not 
always satisfactory to those lying maim- 
ed and crippled in the lower levels. 

All these were, as we can see, the 
ordinary constituents of ordinary Eng 
lish society, neither better nor worse 
than what may be found in hundreds 
of places. But at Andalusia Cottage, 
where Mr. and Mrs. Dundas lived, 
things went a little out of the com- 
mon groove. For it is not often that 
an English gentleman, living at such a 
place as North Aston, brings home for 
his wife a superbly beautiful Spanish 
woman with the face of a sibyl, the tem- 
per of a fiend, the habits of a savage, 
and ignorance to correspond. This, 
however, was Mrs. Dundas summarized, 
and as the small world of North Aston 
had known her for fifteen years. She 
was the one misfitting fragment in this 
well-ordered social mosaic, and it was 
evident that nothing now could trim her 
into the shape she ought to take. It was 
in vain that Mrs. Corfield tried to indoc- 
trinate her into the art and mystery of 
English middle-class housekeeping. To 
the end she never knew the parts of 
speech pertaining to the butcher or the 
grocer, and would eat nothing that was 
not redolent of garlic and slab with oil. 

Mrs. Harrowby, the social chieftainess 
with whom all the North Astonians tried 
to stand well, wished to teach her the 
rudiments — not to go farther — of Eng- 
lish good-breeding. Pepita listened in 
silence, her big black eyes -fixed with a 
kind of stony tragicality on the speaker, 
but none the more did she obey instruc- 
tions. She still went about in the morn- 
ing in unpleasant garments, her long 


12 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AX 


black hair touzled and uncombed, and 
her superb sibylline face innocent of 
soap and water if loaded with yester- 
day’s powder and paint ; nor would she 
rub the one with the white of egg which 
did service with her for the ordinary 
method of ablution, smooth the other 
into braids and stiff-gummed curls fin- 
ished off by the high comb, square knot 
of crimson ribbon and black lace man- 
tilla of her country, nor exchange her 
rags for a decent gown, till far into the 
afternoon. She still neither paid visits 
nor received them if not in the humor, 
and she seldom was in the humor ; and 
in spite of all that Mrs. Harrowby could 
say, when ladies went to call on her and 
she was cross or lazy — and she was 
always cross or lazy, and sometimes 
both — would still shout out in her broken 
English and strident voice, “ I will not 
see them, send them away !” though 
she was lying like a beautiful chrysalis 
in her hammock slung to a cut-leaved 
hornbeam in the garden, smoking cigar- 
ettes and making a hideous noise with 
her “zambomba,” that queer bastard 
kind of drum which she had construct- 
ed for herself, after the manner of her 
country, out of a bit of bladder and an 
inverted flowerpot. No power on earth 
could prevent her from breaking her 
engagements if so minded, nor induce 
her to offer regret or excuse after ; and 
on those rare occasions when they had 
guests at the Cottage she had no more 
scruple in leaving them immediately 
after dinner if she was sleepy and 
wanted to go to bed than she had in 
saying, “You do lie ’’ or “ You are stupid 
as a pig” when she desired to express 
a difference of opinion. For she had 
but one virtue, she used to say with her 
insolent laugh, and that was truth. It 
was not truth, however, for the love of 
truth ; only truth for the scorn of others 
and indifference to what they felt. 

Mrs. Fairbairn preached fresh air and 
Cash’s rough towels as remedial agents 
when she complained of headache and 
dullness. Save on a few of the hottest 
hours of the hottest summer days, Pepita 
shut herself up in the drawing-room, 
doors and windows carefully closed, 


buried in an easy-chair before a huge 
fire, passing half the day in sleep : the 
other half she played at dolls with her 
little daughter Learn. She would not 
walk, and she was a coward and afraid 
of driving. She declared the English 
women were mad with all their soapings 
and brushings and furious exertions, and 
declined to follow bad example and de- 
stroy her peach-like skin before its time ; 
so she stayed at home, rubbed her face 
with white of egg before whitening it 
with pearl-powder and reddening it with 
rouge ; eat sugar and onion, “gazpache ” 
and sweetmeats ; grew enormously stout, 
but still kept her beauty of feature ; 
slept sixteen hours out of the twenty- 
four; and on the remaining eight, when 
not eating, rubbed a stick on her “zam- 
bomba’’ or played at dolls with her little 
daughter, for whose special benefit she 
had dressed one like the devil, and 
taught her to call it El seiior papa. In 
short, she was the savage of North As- 
ton, and people never knew from one 
day to another of what mad atrocity 
she might not have been guilty over 
night. So far she had her uses, in that 
she kept the place alive and afforded 
ceaseless occasion for talk and specu- 
lation. 

As for Mrs. Birkett. true to her cen- 
tral principle of non-intervention, she 
left the savage alone and did not lend a 
hand in the attempted work of salvation. 
She thought her a most unpleasant per- 
son, and said so — one whom she greatly 
feared and as greatly disliked. But she 
also thought that Mr. Dundas was very 
much to blame in marrying such a crea- 
ture. It was a slight to the ladies of the 
place, and she was not quite sure that it 
ought to have been condoned from the 
beginning. Nevertheless, her private 
feeling did not influence her public man- 
ner; and although she said some hard 
things in confidence to her friends, she 
was always amiable to Mrs. Dundas in 
person — keeping out of her way as much 
as possible, and when in it smiling much 
and saying little ; by which means she 
escaped the fate of those more energetic 
gentlewomen whom, because they wish- 
ed to reform her, Pepita abused in Span- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


! ish safely, and called by names the equiv- 
I alents of which would have been consid- 
I ered strong even at Billingsgate. 

But if Mr. Dundas was to be blamed, 
he was also to be pitied. He had mar- 
ried this woman, picked up in a small 
wayside “venta” in the wilds of Anda- 
lusia, for that mad kind of love which 
possesses men like a malady — that love 
which makes them throw off the re- 
straints of self - respect and common 
sense for the sake of tying a millstone 
round their necks which will one day 
drown them in the deep waters. He 
never gave an on-look to the years when 
passion should mean nothing and men- 
tal harmony all ; when the beautiful mis- 
tress, fresh and young, should have be- 
come the wife of daily habit whose black 
eyes would have ceased to fascinate, and 
whose sole power of attraction would be 
in her mind and temper. He was in 
love, and saw the “ ventero’s” handsome 
daughter with the veiled eyes of romance 
and the belief in the all-sufficiency of 
beauty characteristic of that fatal artistic 
temperament by which men are ruined. 
When he was couched of his blindness 
it was too late. Nevertheless, he had 
still a kind of angry love for her, and re- 
sented that she was not all he had be- 
lieved her to be, as much for the loss of 
his ideal as for the discomfort in which 
he lived through her heathenish modes 
of life. But the fact of his love still ex- 
isting as an undercurrent did not make 
his peevishness more endurable to her, 
nor help to soften the savage hatred she 
felt for England and the English ; for 
she, on her side, had had eyes veiled by 
romance and couched by knowledge. 
To her the tall fair handsome English- 
man, whose color went and came in his 
face like a girl’s when she looked at him 
— who, Sebastian too himself by name, 
was so strangely like that picture of Saint 
Sebastian in the little chapel on the rock 
where she used to go and tell her beads 
she sometimes half dreamed it was the 
Blessed One himself incarnate, and who 
loved her with such strength and tender- 
ness combined — was a plaything too 
novel to lose. When she came to rec- 
ognize his non-saintship, and to acknow- 


ledge his very natural humanity, she 
took up the other golden thread of his 
being. He was a grand hidalgo when at 
home, far superior to the brigands and 
muleteers who were his rivals, whom yet 
she regretted too. But though she liked 
her swarthy compatriots better in a way 
than she liked her fair-haired English 
Caballero, yet he bid highest for her, and 
dangled before her eyes the most tempt- 
ing lures. He would take her to El 
Corte, and show her the marvels of the 
great world. She was too ignorant to 
include Paris and London : it was only 
El Corte of which she dreamed as the 
heaven which this Englishman’s gold 
could open for her. 

When she married her fair-faced hi- 
dalgo, and came down to a dull, damp 
English village, where the sun never 
shone for more than two days in the 
year ; where the fruit was sour and 
scanty; where there were no country 
fairs, no festas, no bull- fights ; where 
they knew nothing of village dancing, 
never heard of the merry snapping “pa- 
lillos” even as castanets — the wretched 
heathens ! — and where they never went 
for the family washing to the stream ; 
where there were no bells to the horses, 
no flowers, no color, no priests and no 
saints, — then she saw the mistake she 
had made, and revenged herself on the 
man who had occasioned it. She had 
never lov.ed her husband as men count 
love. She had been overcome by his 
insistence, and dazzled by the dreams 
she had woven for herself. When the 
dreams faded and the reality came, her 
true nature showed itself, and she let the 
poor fellow understand clearly enough 
how things were with her. It nearly 
broke his heart. But she was a Span- 
iard who loved bull-fights ; and if Dun- 
das, as she called him, looked like Saint 
Sebastian, she thought he might as well 
complete the character and be well fitted 
with arrows. 

Hence the life these ill-matched dream- 
ers made together was of the least edi- 
fying kind. Her only solace was in 
Learn, whom she loved as a tigress loves 
her cub — his, in ceaseless lamentation 
and the universal demand for sympathy 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM BUND AS. 


14 

natural to an affectionate and weak-will- 
ed man. As a rule, the women at North 
Aston gave him the sympathy he sought, 
but the men, after the manner of men, 
thought him but a poor creature at, the 
best, and said among themselves that 
Pepita certainly was superb. And every 
man believed in his heart that he could 
have managed her if she had be^ his 
wife, but with such a fusionless creature 
as Dundas it was no wonder things went 
badly. 

If the women generally took his part, 
especially did the Misses Harrowby, who 
had known Sebastian Dundas in his 
bachelor days, when they had all been 
girls and boys together, and he had been 
suspected of casting friendly glances that 
way. Things might have been different 
if he had never gone on his travels 
through Europe, they used to think, 
never taken a craze to visit the Alham- 
bra, old Seville and Andalusia ; and it 
would have been better for him had they 
been different. It would be hard to say 
which of the three — Maria, Fanny or 
Josephine — most lamented the untoward 
course of fate, most sympathized with his 
misfortunes, or regarded his wife with 
the greatest bitterness as the ruin of a 
dear good fellow who would have been 
such a charming man had he found the 
right kind of woman. 

Perhaps, as time went on, the elder 
two dropped a little behind. They be- 
gan to take life as they found it made 
for them — to be content with small things 
and to leave off looking for large ones. 
But Josephine was softer and younger. 
She had a habit of sighing; she and 
Sebastian often played at chess ; and 
she did not find the Hill, fine old place 
as it was, so perfect as not to like some- 
times to leave it for a castle of her own 
building and a seneschal of her own 
imagining — tall, fair-haired, fond of sym- 
pathy and as generous to submission as 
he was pliant to caresses. Had any one 
told her she was in love with Mr. Dun- 
das, a married man, she would have de- 
nied it indignantly, and she would have 
been broken-hearted for shame and re- 
morse had she proved the truth for her- 
self. But men and women have the trick 


of self-deception undesigned ; and things 
plain as an Egyptian pyramid to the world 
outside are hidden away, like jewels in a 
mine, from the soul harboring them in 
unconsciousness, but with tenacity — as in 
this matter of Josephine’s blameless, un- 
confessed, but indisputable affection for 
Pepita’s husband. 


CHAPTER TIT. 

MADAME lA MARQUISE DE MONTKORT. 

The rector and Mrs. Birkett were just 
finishing dinner. The month was April, 
time of day seven. Adelaide was spend- 
ing the evening at the Hill ; for though 
she was only twenty, and Josephine, the 
youngest Miss Harrowby, was, as we 
know, thirty at the least, the rector’s 
daughter had chosen the three sisters 
as her chief friends, and had especially 
selected Josephine as her confidante and 
quasi-sister. 

She admired the old Hall ; the estate 
was large and well managed ; Edgar, 
though in India at this moment, must 
come home some day ; and Edgar was 
a handsome, love-making kind of gal- 
lant, who two or three years ago had 
been fond of rowing Adelaide on the 
Broad, as they called a widened reach 
of river that did duty for the North Aston 
sailing-ground ; and Adelaide had not 
only a determined will, but a clear per- 
ception of those things whereon it was 
wisest to fix it, and the means whereby 
it was the likeliest to be attained. 

Presently, while the rector was drain- 
ing his last drop of generous port, and 
Mrs. Birkett was choosing for him the 
best-looking nuts and the fattest raisins, 
the servant came quickly into the room. 
“ If you please, sir, will you step down 
to Aaron’s ?” he said, speaking very fast. 
“ There’s come a lady and a child, and 
the child’s badly and can’t go no farther; 
and Aaron he don’t know what to do 
with them ; so he has sent up Jane to 
say what’s corned upon them, and to 
ask, sir. as if you’ll please step’ down 
and be kind enough to see as what can 
be done ?” 

“A lady and child ill ?” answered the 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


15 


I rector dubiously and with an accent of 
I annoyance. “/ am not the person to 
; send for, John. Why does not Aaron 
go for Dr. Corfield?” 

“If you please, sir, Aaron says he 
would rather you stepped down, as the 
child’s so bad it’s like to die, and maybe 
wants naming.” 

“ Did he tell you anything about this 
lady ? — for it is a most extraordinary pro- 
ceeding on Aaron’s part,” said the rector 
crossly. 

Consecrated to the care of lambs in 
the abstract, it did not please him to de- 
range himself for an unknown sheep wan- 
dering from strange folds, and perchance 
one of a shabby flock fed on poor pas- 
tures. 

“Aaron says she is quite the lady, 
and as handsome as ever you see, with 
a mort of luggage, and the child fit to 
die,” repeated the man. 

“Poor little thing!” said Mrs. Birkett 
sympathetically. The good soul gave a 
backward look to the time when her own 
cradle was full of sweet anxieties, and 
felt for the mother in her extremity. “ I 
think, papa, you ought to go perhaps,” 
she added with a certain hesitancy, be- 
ing of that wise order of wives which 
lets the husband alone and does not seek 
to herd him like a dumb beast, sure to 
go wrong if not directed right. “ There 
is no hurry. Finish your wine, dear ; 
but the poor thing may want you, and 
then you would be sorry not to have 
gone.” 

“Well, I think I will go,” said the rec- 
tor a little briskly. The mention of the 
unknown lady’s beauty and the mort of 
luggage had enlightened his mind as to 
the direction of his duties. “As you say, 
mamma, the unhappy creature may be 
in want of help ; and if she is really a 
lady she must indeed want help without 
mistake. To have a sick child to nurse 
at Aaron’s does not sound very prom- 
ising.” 

“No, indeed,” said Mrs. Birkett, her 
kind face full of pity. 

“Very well, John, tell them I will be 
down directly,” said Mr. Birkett with his 
military manner ; and John, giving back 
the regulation “Yes, sir,” disappeared. 


Then said Mr. Birkett, speaking from 
the door, being one of those all-or- 
nothing men who if they are asked for 
a hair give the whole head^ “I say, 
mamma, if I find that the child is really 
too ill to go on, and there is nothing in- 
fectious, don’t you think I had better 
bring her up here to sleep ? That is, 
you know, if she is really a lady?” 

“ I am sure I don’t know,” answered 
Mrs. Birkett with a curious mixture of 
timidity and earnestness. “As far as I 
am concerned, yes, most certainly ; but 
there is Adelaide. However, use your 
own discretion, and ask Pace.” 

“ I wish you were a little more the mis- 
tress of your own establishment, my 
dear,” said the rector in an aggrieved 
tone as he went into the hall and sum- 
moned Pace; which was just what he 
did not like to do. 

Though he always had been and al- 
ways would be master in his own esti- 
mate of things, he never cared to try 
conclusions with Pace, who ruled the 
whole house — himself and Adelaide, who 
ruled all else, included — and that with a 
rod by no means wrapped in cotton wool, 
and considerably heavier than if made 
of flowers. She was one of those grim 
females who tyrannize in tears and sup- 
press by pretending to renounce. If 
anything went wrong, and she was ap- 
pealed to as the one who ought to know 
why, she would break out into angry 
weeping and protestations of how she 
slaved night and day for the family ; and 
how she hoped they might find some one 
who would do better by them than she 
had done ; and how she found it hard, 
after living with them so long and doing 
all for them that she had, to be told at 
the last that they did not trust her and 
were not satisfied ; with more to the 
same purpose. By which it came about 
that, as she was really the most useful 
member of the household, if also the 
most unpleasant, Mrs. Birkett had to ask 
her to stay as a personal kindness ; and 
each fracas ended by the chains being 
riveted more closely than before, and 
the mistresshood of Pace more solidly 
confirmed. 

By good luck this importan*t personage 


i6 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DU NBAS, 


happened to be in an amiable frame of 
mind this evening. Her mistress had 
presented her in the morning with an 
apricot-colored silk gown, much stained 
if little worn, and quite unsuitable to a 
woman of her age and condition. But 
it would dye, thought thrifty Pace, who, 
having already saved much, was intent 
on adding to her store, therefore always 
received her perquisites intelligently, and 
never allowed herself to be baffled by 
^ stains or unsuitability. 

Hence, when Mr. Birkett asked meekly 
as to spirit if masterful in form, “Pace, 
if the lady at the Wellington is obliged 
to remain over the night on account of 
her child, and the child has no infectious 
disorder, can you put her up?” Pace 
answered with a shade less surliness 
than usual, “ If you wish it, sir, I must, 
though I don’t see how it can be done at 
this time of night, and nothing ready.” 

And the man who ruled the parish 
with no uncertain hand was grateful for 
so much concession from his house- 
keeper. Even Achilles had his vulner- 
able spot, and Mr. Birkett was afraid of 
his wife’s old nurse and general facto- 
tum. 

It was just as well that he should be 
afraid of something — just as well that 
he was only a pumpkin after all, very 
fine and showy on the outside, masterful 
and dictatorial to his inferiors, but with 
a core no stronger than pith. Had he 
been as solid as he was magnificent, as 
real as he was arbitrary, he would have 
been a frightful infliction to his little 
world. As it was, he was malleable 
under well-planted blows, and Pace, for 
one, knew where to plant them. Nothing 
of this, however, appeared on the sur- 
face, and as he walked quickly down the 
hill to the help of the stranger sojourn- 
ing at the Wellington, he looked every 
inch the local king and masculine dom- 
inator of all about. 

A hired carriage stood before the beer- 
shop door. The rector’s quick eye at 
once discovered that the luggage piled 
on the top and slung behind was of 
superior quality and sufficient quantity. 
So far, things looked satisfactory, and 
he lowered his well-brushed head as he 


passed into the dingy passage with a 
comfortable conviction that the person 
he had gone to visit would prove in truth 
a lady, and that he was on the verge of 
a pleasant yet safe adventure. Asking 
in a loud voice for “the strange lady I 
have been desired to see,” he was taken 
into the sanded parlor smelling of stale 
tobacco and permanent spillings of 
beer, and stood face to face with the 
new-comer. 

She was a handsome woman of about 
thirty, to judge by the generous lines of 
her fine figure, but she might have been 
only twenty, taking her features, skin 
and coloring at the first glance — her 
brilliantly fair complexion, her lustrous 
golden hair, her small white teeth, the 
brightness of her well-shaped hazel eyes, 
and the rounded contour of her soft 
smooth cheek. She was dressed in deep 
mourning, with a widow’s cap under her 
bonnet, and looked subdued and quiet, 
but noticeably self-possessed. The child 
on her lap was about six months old. 
Here was a woman evidently used to 
good society, thought the rector, as she 
bowed when he entered, raising her 
bright eyes steadily to his, and apolo- 
gizing in a low, sweet, level voice for not 
rising, on the plea of not disturbing her 
child. 

“Pray do not disturb yourself,” said 
Mr. Birkett with his best air, fatherly for 
the priestly part of him, gallant for the 
soldierly. “ I am afraid the little child is 
very ill,” he continued, drawing a chair 
near to her and examining the infant 
lying in a death-like torpor in her arms. 

“Yes, she is,” said the lady sadly. 
“This dreadful sleep came on about an 
hour ago, just as I was passing the head 
of your valley on my way to Sherrington. 
Had my nurse been with me, I should 
have thought she had given her opium, 
and I should not have been so much 
alarmed then, knowing the cause. But 
I have had the child to myself all the 
day, and know that it is not that ; and I 
cannot tell what to think.” She raised 
the little hand to her lips. “ My sweet 
one !” she said tenderly, bending over it 
gracefully. 

“ I think you had better send for Dr. 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


17 


Corfield,” said the rector, more and 
more interested. “It is a long way to 
Sherrington, and the diseases of children 
are rapid. At all events, you cannot be 
wrong in sending for him.’’ 

“Yes,’’ the lady answered. “Is Dr. 
Corfield skillful ?’’ 

“He is all we have in this remote 
place,’’ said Mr. Birkett ; “and though 
he does not practice much now, he is 
ready enough in resource, and knows 
his profession.’’ 

“Thank you !’’ then said the lady, lift- 
ing up her winsome face, to which grat- 
itude gave a flush infinitely becoming. 
“ I thought you would advise nie to some- 
thing. Clergymen are always so wise 
and helpful. Will you, then, be kind 
enough to tell them to send for the doc- 
tor ? I did not know that one was to be 
found in so small a place.’’ 

Her voice and manner, though per- 
fectly feminine and even grateful, had 
just that fine air and accent of a woman 
who is accustomed to command — a “ mis- 
tress ’’ woman, used to homage and ac- 
cepting it as her right — which so much 
pleases some men. It pleased the rec- 
tor, and confirmed his faith in the new- 
comer’s quality ; and when he told 
“Aaron’s Jane,’’ as Mrs. Walsh was call- 
ed by the neighbors, “to send off at 
once to Dr. Corfield, and beg him with his 
compliments to come over to the Wel- 
lington without delay,’’ he spoke with 
the peremptory insistence he would have 
used had the unknown been one of the 
royal princesses and the comatose child 
the future hope of England. Then he 
ordered candles to be brought, and him- 
self arranged them to the greatest con- 
venience of his companion ; and he 
thought she looked more beautiful under 
their pale shine than even under the 
parting glory of the golden sunset. 

In a short time Dr. Corfield came, 
abstracted, dreamy, full of his latest ex- 
periments in toxicology ; but he knew 
what he was about, though he scarcely 
looked like it, and caught certain indica- 
tions of hair-tint and complexion in the 
stranger which had escaped even the 
lynx eyes of the rector. After making 
his examination of the child in silence, 
2 


during which time the lady had in her 
turn. watched him narrowly, he peered 
mildly over his spectacles and said sim- 
ply, “Opium.’’ 

“ So I too would have thought had I 
not had the child with me all the day,’’ 
said the lady, as she had said before. 
“ No, it is not opium ; and it is that which 
has alarmed me so much.’’ 

Dr. Corfield looked puzzled. “ Not like- 
ly to be teething coma,’’ he muttered as 
if to himself, rubbing his chin. 

“ Never mind the name what can I 
do for her ? What ought I to do ?’’ ask- 
ed the lady, going straight to the point, 
as the rector remarked with approba- 
tion. 

“A fine business-like woman,’’ he said 
to himself. “ So truly feminine and lady- 
like, but with no nonsense about her.’’ 
He was in the mood to find all she said 
and did in good taste. She had fas- 
cinated him. 

Dr. Corfield smiled. “But the name 
regulates the treatment,’’ he said in his 
quiet, dreamy way. 

“Meanwhile, my child dies,’’ returned 
the lady with natural pathos, and just a 
touch of indignation. 

Dr. Corfield considered — the rector, 
saying, “Come, Corfield, come!’’ as if 
he was speaking to a slow boy in his 
class. 

“A warm bath, cold applications to 
the head, and I’ll send you some medi- 
cine to be given at once,’’ he then said. 

“Thank you,’’ said the lady, with less 
gratitude than she had shown to Mr. 
Birkett. 

“ How far are you going to-night ?’’ 
asked the doctor. 

Lifting her eyes and looking at him 
quietly, the lady answered, “Surely, I 
am not going on at all. I shall halt 
here, of course. How could I travel 
with the child in this state ?’’ 

“ But you carmot sleep here,’’ inter- 
posed Mr. Birkett. 

She looked round the squalid little 
room with a patient smile. 

“I did not see what kind of place I 
was in,’’ she said. “No, truly, I cannot 
sleep here, but I can sit up and watch.’’ 

“You must come to the rectory,’’ said 


i8 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


Mr. Birkett warmly. “We are homely 
people ’’ — there was not a luxury miss- 
ing in the establishment, not a square 
inch of the whole house that was not 
perfect in its upholstery — “but you will 
find comforts there for your little one you 
cannot find here. This is a mere village 
beershop, in no wise fitted for you.” 

She bent over her baby. Then rais- 
ing a face calm as to feature, but as pale 
as the child’s in her arms, she answered 
quietly, “ Thank you very much. I can- 
not refuse your kindness for my child’s 
sake. I am ashamed of giving you so 
much trouble, an entire stranger as I 
am, but the mother’s need must plead 
for me.’’ 

She spoke sweetly, calmly and with 
dignity, but her low voice a little falter- 
ed, and she was evidently much moved. 
Truly, a most gracious lady, one who 
knew how to mingle the nobleness of 
self-respect with the tenderness of wo- 
manhood, and to accept a favor as if 
conferring a grace. 

“You need no pleader,’’ said the rec- 
tor. “We are delighted, Mrs. Birkett 
and I, to be of this service to you.’’ 

“ Shall I send the medicine to the rec- 
tory ?’’ asked Dr. Corfield, singularly for 
him the most practical at this moment 
of the three. 

“Yes,” answered the rector; and the. 
lady, bending her head, murmured again, 
“Thanks.” 

“As I am to be your guest, you will 
probably wish to know my name,” then 
said the lady rising and looking at the 
rector. “ I am Madame de Montfort. I 
may say,” she added with a slight smile, 
as one passing by a silly toy — and her 
renunciation only made her more beau- 
tiful — “ I am Madame la Marquise de 
Montfort, as my dear husband was Mon- 
sieur le Marquis. But I do not care to 
take my rank in England, where I am 
not known, more especially now that he 
has gone.” She sighed, and her red lips 
quivered. “But that is my real name,” 
smiling sadly again, and conquering her 
emotion with a visible effort. 

“ It is a good name,” said the rector, 
who felt that he ought to say something, 
and scarcely knew what. 


“A fine old name,” put in Dr. Cor- 
field. “Simon de Montfort was a great 
man.” 

“ We belong to the same family,” said 
madame with decision. 

“Ay?” said the doctor: “your pedi- 
gree would be interesting to trace.” 

“ My dear baby’s recovery is the most 
interesting subject to me at this mo- 
ment,” replied madame, as, shifting the 
child with a certain dainty air of inex- 
perience in her manner, she looked at 
the rector as if waiting his permission 
to leave. 

“True, true,” said Mr. Birkett hur- 
riedly. “ I beg you a thousand pardons 
for this delay.” 

She bent her head again with her 
sweet and royal kind of smile, then 
passed from the room like a queen, and 
in a few moments the horses stopped 
before the porch of the pretty house 
where Mr. and Mrs. Birkett and their 
daughter Adelaide found their home. 

“Now,” said the rector gallantly, “I 
trust you have come to the end of your 
troubles.” 

“Can it be otherwise under the sanc- 
tuary of the Church?” answered the 
lady. “The instant I saw you, dear sir, 
I felt comforted and safe.” 

“What a charming woman !” thought 
the rector. “What an exceedingly lucky 
thing that I thought of bringing her here ! 
Quite refreshing to meet with such a crea- 
ture in this dull hole!” 

And as he thought these last words he 
ushered the widow of Monsieur le Mar- 
quis de Montfort into the drawing-room 
where sat his kindly, placid, tender- 
hearted wife. 


CHAPTER IV. 

WORTH DOING. 

A BABY was the only thing that could 
rouse Mrs. Birkett from her normal con- 
dition of even-tempered indolence. She 
was intensely maternal for infants, if not 
a satisfactory educator of older children, 
and could have passed her whole life in 
a nursery with a succession of embryonic 
heroes and heroines to kiss and dandle. 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM FUND AS. 


19 


For any baby in long clothes she was a 
true spiritual Althaea, and found nothing 
a trouble if transacted ^ithin the nur- 
sery ; but for a sick baby she was as the 
mother of the gods to be had by the day 
for love, with an almost extra- natural 
prescience of its wants and needs so 
soon as she had it in her comfortable 
arms and in her broad maternal lap. 

She had a kind of magnetic power, 
too, that was very striking. She could 
soothe a crying child when no one else 
was able to quiet it, and her medical 
skill about the cradle was like another 
sense. The one sorrow of her married 
life was that she had not had a large 
family, and the woman she most en- 
vied was Mrs. Fairb^^rn of the Limes. 
A child every eighteen months — a baby 
always on hand. Could there be a 
greater joy on earth ? a happier lot for 
woman ? When she thought this she 
inclined to find her quiver with its one 
solitary shait but very meagrely fur- 
nished; and Adelaide, instead of gaining 
interest by concentration, seemed to lose 
for want of sharers. 

This arrival, then, of a lady with a 
sick child was as much a godsend to the 
rector’s wife as to the rector himself, and 
she received Madame de Montfort with 
all her faculties aroused and all her 
sympathies alert, prepared to accept 
anything the mother might be for the 
sake of the child. 

But when she saw the beautiful face 
and form of the stranger, heard her sin- 
gularly sweet voice, noted her ease of 
manner and well-bred self-possession, 
and looked into her fine eyes, she was as 
much captivated with her personality as 
her husband had been, and showed her 
belief with the simplest good faith. She 
received her as her friend, and took her 
sorrows as her own. Madame was al- 
most bewildered by the warmth of her 
new hostess, and wished she had been 
slightly less demonstrative. She em- 
barrassed her and made it difficult, as 
she said to herself. 

Mrs. Birkett took the baby into her 
own arms, and looked at it as Dr. Cor- 
field had done, with more tenderness if 
less technical perspicacity, but narrowly 


enough to make the mother still more 
uncomfortable, and to render that vague 
“difficulty” yet more embarrassing. 

“ I know exactly what should be done 
with it, madame,” then said Mrs. Birkett 
after a pause. “My own child had Just 
such an attack as this when she was a 
little thing, and I thought I should have 
lost her, but I knew what to do, and so 
saved her; and she never had another.” 

At which madame, looking straight 
into her face, answered with a grateful 
air of retrospective sympathy : “ How 
distressing ! and how strange I I am in- 
deed fortunate in finding such a clever 
adviser.” 

“Oh, I hope we shall soon get the 
poor little darling right,” said kindly 
Mrs. Birkett, her maternal breast aglow. 

And madame, with a graceful slight 
inclination of her head, echoed “ I hope 
so” in a manner that gave her hostess 
the credit of the cure should it be effected. 

Then Mrs. Birkett, still carrying the 
baby, herself took the stranger to her 
room, herself saw the bath prepared and 
carefully tested with a thermometer, ar- 
ranged the chairs, stirred the fire, and 
caused to be brought in three times as 
many things as were wanted, much to 
the annoyance of Pace, who disliked the 
rooms to be what she called “upset,” 
and who resented as a personal injury 
any departure from the fixed rules of 
life and ordering she had established in 
the house. 

It was a marvelous outburst of energy 
in one who was content generally to take 
life in an easy-chair and “on casters,” 
neither fretting her mind nor disturbing 
her body for any event that might or 
might not happen. But the rector thought 
it not unnatural on the whole, seeing what 
kind of person Madame la Marquise de 
Montfort was, and how far superior to the 
ordinary run of women. The child did 
not count for much in his calculations. 

In due time the medicine arrived, the 
little creature was put into the bath, and 
madame, at her own request, was left 
for the night. She preferred the lonely 
vigils of her anxious love, she said pret- 
tily, to being enlivened by companion- 
ship or relieved by substitutes ; and Mrs. 


20 


T'HE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


Birkett, though reluctant, was forced to 
respect her wishes. Had she had her 
own way she would have sat up with 
the baby herself. There would have 
been no fear of her falling asleep, unless 
it had got better and was asleep too — 
naturally, not in this death-like state. 
Then indeed she might; and what a 
blessed sleep, once more with a little one 
pressed to her bosom and encircled in 
her arms ! 

But she could not force herself on her 
guest, and was fain to withdraw tearful- 
ly. And when the stranger was perfect- 
ly sure that the hospitable instincts of 
her host and hostess were all fulfilled, 
she locked the door, gave the baby 
something that made it open its eyes 
and moan feebly, but that seemed to do 
it good ; and as she leaned over it said 
with unaffected compassion, but no extra 
sentiment, speaking indeed more as a 
kind - hearted spectator might have 
spoken than as a mother, “Poor little 
thing ! I am sorry for you ; but it was 
worth doing, baby.” 

On which she placed it comfortably on 
the pillow, and then sat down to reflect, 
a smile on her comely face and a look 
of success in her sparkling eyes. 

“The stars in their courses are fighting 
for me,” she said, her face flooded with 
triumphant joy as she turned it toward 
the firelight. Drawing a deep breath, 
she added, “Things are almost too easy. 
I must be careful not to rely too much 
on my good luck, and not to relax.” 

At this time she had not seen Adelaide. 

If Madame la Marquise de Montfort 
was charming over night, when subdued 
and depressed because of her baby, she 
was doubly so this morning, when, her 
little daughter being better, she had her 
mind more to herself and could talk 
with less preoccupation. And she talk- 
ed well, in spite of one or two odd slips 
in grammar that made her hearers stare 
at their incongruity with her manner and 
appearance, not to speak of her station. 
But as she had lived a great part of her 
life abroad, so she said, these slips might 
charitably pass as the natural conse- 
quence of her foreign education, and 
not provoke unfriendly comment. 


She knew, too, many people of note — 
in itself a recommendation — and she 
mentioned them in an incidental way, 
carelessly and by chance, without effort 
or apparent boast. They came too much 
as a matter of course for boasting, but 
she evidently, said the rector, knew a 
great many celebrities, and her acquaint- 
ance with titles was as extensive. And 
how beautiful she was ! Sitting there in 
the morning light, her deep crape weeds 
made in such perfection of fit and taste, 
and the most becoming little trifle of a 
widow’s cap set on the top of her golden 
tresses, the rector thought he had never 
seen a lovelier creature of the kind ; and 
even Mrs. Birkett felt yet more tenderly 
to the child for the admiration she was 
by no means backward in bestowing on 
the mother. But Adelaide watched and 
weighed, and doubted if she was even 
pretty. She had to know her better, she 
said to herself, before she could allow 
her to be good-looking : at present she 
only watched. 

Talking still in the level, smooth man- 
ner that was habitual to her, madame 
touched on her personal history. Her 
husband was only just dead, she said, 
her fine hazel eyes becoming moist, but 
no tears actually overflowing. She was 
of a nature too self-restrained to weep 
like a school-girl before strangers, and 
show her bleeding wounds without ret- 
icence or delicacy. And in a kind of 
sick despair — for what had life now to 
offer her ? — she went on to say, speaking 
very calmly, but therefore only the more 
pathetically, she had determined to leave 
the world and all its hollow joys, and 
find some place in the country where 
she might devote herself to her child, 
and try to be, if not happy — she should 
never be that again — at the least useful 
to others, and for herself resigned. She 
had heard of Sherrington, she said, as a 
pretty, quiet village — it was a bleak, up- 
land market-town, without picturesque 
beauty or local advantage of any kind — 
and she thought that she might be able to 
live there economically ; for, with a grand 
and gracious frankness that sat so well 
on her, she confessed that she was not 
too rich since her dear husband’s death. 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


21 


His property, which was very extensive, 
had gone to his brother as the next heir, 
her child, being a girl, not inheriting. 

At which the rector stared, but sup- 
posed she knew what she was talking 
about, and that the French law of in- 
heritance might be one thing for com- 
moners and another for the nobility. Or 
perhaps he had been misinformed as to 
that family division of lands he had been 
taught to consider universal ; at any rate', 
he was not disposed to doubt the truth 
of the whole for the sake of this one en- 
igma as yet unexplained, but sure to be 
easily solved if only he had the key. 
This slip, however, was not lost on Ad- 
elaide ; and Adelaide had less than her 
father’s faith. 

Therefore, madame continued, finding 
the country the best place for herself and 
her child, she had sold off everything, 
and left London, where she and her dear 
husband had been residing for the last 
year, parting with her carriages and 
horses, her men-servants and her wo- 
men-servants, of course. She could not 
ask them to share a fortune so changed 
as hers. But with a sweet motherliness 
of soul shining through her discourse 
that charmed Mrs. Birkett she somewhat' 
wondered that her nurse refused to ac- 
company her. And yet, sighing, what 
right had she to expect any one to sacri- 
fice her life to her, a stranger ? Only, 
turning to the rector’s wife listening so 
sympathetically, she thought that if she 
had had a child from the birth, as nurse 
had had her darling, she could not have 
left her. 

To which Mrs. Birkett responded by a 
warm negative, and, kind-hearted as she 
was, a vehement ejaculation of “Wretch !’’ 
flung like a red-hot missile after the faith- 
less and self-seeking bonne. 

Journeying from Bar Aston Station to 
Sherrington, she went on to say, just as 
she passed the head of the North Aston 
valley her child sank back in her arms 
in the alarming kind of fit they had seen. 
In terror and despair she told the driver 
to turn from the main road and follow 
the way to the village. She could do 
nothing else, such a complete stranger 
as she was, knowing neither the place 


nor its surroundings. Thus it was that 
she had come to North Aston ; and the 
result they knew as well as she did. 

“Surely,” she concluded, looking at 
Mr. and Mrs. Birkett effusively, “some 
spirit led me by the hand.” 

“If so, then it was our good genius,” 
said Mr. Birkett gallantly. 

“I am sure it was mine,” responded 
Madame de Montfort. 

“By which it would appear that we 
have the same,” said the rector; and 
madame smiled and bent her head, 
saying, “ How fortunate for me !” 

“Then,” said Mrs. Birkett, who seem- 
ed to have been revolving something in 
her mind, and to whom the servant at 
her own desire had just delivered the 
baby, “ if there was a house here fit for 
you, how far better it would be to remain 
among us, instead of going to that hid- 
eous Sherrington I It is the dullest and 
most uninteresting place you can imag- 
ine. Why go there ?” 

Madame de Montfort looked calm and 
tractable. “I have no special ties there,” 
she answered. “ I remember a friend of 
my dear husband’s telling him one day 
about it, and praising it. It was by the 
merest chance I remembered this in my 
day of need ; but I do not care where I 

go-" 

“You might as well live in a pretty 
place as in an ugly one,” said Mrs. Bir- 
kett, who was herself much influenced 
by scenery. 

“Surely,” answered madame: “that is 
only common sense. But,” she slightly 
sighed, “it makes no real difference to 
me where I am if the air agrees with my 
darling, and I can live in peace and do 
good.” 

“ I wish we had a place for you here,” 
said Mrs. Birkett again, and looked at 
her husband. 

Madame, her face quiet and statuesque 
as usual, her eyes bright too as usual, 
bent toward her child and tenderly tap- 
ped its little face. 

“But you have not?” she asked, her 
breath slightly incommoded by her atti- 
tude. “Then it must be Sherrington.” 

Mr. Birkett reflected. “There is no 
place anywhere,” he answered, “except 


22 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


Lionnet. “Would that do, mamma, for 
Madame de Montfort ?’* 

“It is very small, certainly,’’ mused 
Mrs. Birkett, while madame looked from 
each to each with the air of foregone ac- 
quiescence in their judgment — an acqui- 
escence that was not weakness — there 
was nothing weak about her — but that 
conveyed in the most subtle and delight- 
ful way the sense of her own ignorance, 
her moral weariness for the loss of her 
husband, and her gratitude to them for 
taking so much care of her and giving 
themselves so much trouble for her. 

“Oh, mamma, Lionnet fora lady !’’ cried 
Adelaide, with condemnatory emphasis. 

This was the first time she had spoken. 
Hitherto she had contented herself with 
looking and listening, forming her own 
opinion of the stranger’s loosely-hung if 
smoothly-narrated story. Now she spoke, 
hoping to demolish the theory of the Lion 
Hut as a suitable residence for this new- 
comer with the fine air and the grand 
name. Adelaide Birkett, with her pale 
flaxen tresses and cold blue eyes, was 
not so much fascinated by this splendid 
creature with the warm gold, close-waved 
hair, and hazel eyes so full of life and 
fire, as were her father and mother. 
She kept her twenty-years’-old intellect 
more in hand than they, and criticised 
more keenly because she doubted more 
coldly. 

The rector, who had seen as much of 
the odd side of life as a respectable cler- 
gyman well can, and more perhaps than 
he ought, might have picked a few holes 
in the thin places of his guest’s history 
had he been so minded, but he w'as res- 
olute to turn only the best side outer- 
most, and he left the thin places un- 
touched, by design. Adelaide, on the 
contrary, searched for them with vicious 
diligence, and when she found them she 
held by them and made them larger. 

Had she been asked, she could have 
given no intelligible reason why she had 
taken this strong antipathy to madame. 
She was not given to strong emotions of 
any kind as a rule, and she prided her- 
self on her indifference to most people. 
But all she knew was that, in spite of the 
sweet smile and that perfect tranquillity 


of good breeding which so charmed 
her parents, she disliked and distrusted 
this handsome immigrant from Heaven 
knows where, this sorrowful widow of 
M. le Marquis de Montfort, this anxious 
mother of an ailing infant, this plausible 
artist in the mosaic-work of well-fitting 
story, wherein, all the same, well fitting 
as it was, were gaps ; and that she dis- 
liked and distrusted her as she had never 
disliked or distrusted any one before — 
not even Pepita, the wife of Sebastian 
Dundas, with whom she had waged for 
years an unceasing war. 

“ It is small, as Adelaide says,’’ return- 
ed the rector in a tone of apology, “but 
it is available, and a little taste and ju- 
dicious expenditure can do wonders with 
it.’’ 

“At all events, you can look at it,’’ 
Mrs. Birkett suggested. “It is only a 
few minutes’ drive from here — not a 
quarter of an hour’s walk even for me, 
and I am not a good walker.’’ 

“That would be very nice for me,’’ 
said madame smiling: “I could see so 
much of you then, and not under fatigue. 
And I have always been a dutiful daugh- 
ter of the Church.’’ 

“Ah?’’ returned the rector, with that 
curious pride of the ecclesiastic who 
takes to himself all the compliments 
paid to the faith or the Establishment. 

“Yes, my father was a clergyman,’’ 
said madame. 

“ Indeed ! Where ?’’ asked the rector 
briskly, suggestive of looking up the 
name in the Clergy List, 

“In America,’’ answered madame de- 
murely. 

“ Have you been in America ?’’ said 
Mrs. Birkett with surprise.' “You have 
no accent.’’ 

“ I was born there,’’ answered madame, 
“and I lived there till I came to Europe 
to be educated.’’ 

And as she said the word “Europe’’ 
she gave it the American intonation, 
which settled the matter. 

Only Adelaide said, a little spitefully, 
“ The daughter of an American clergy- 
man married to a French nobleman liv- 
ing in London ! What an extraordinary 
mixture !’’ 


I 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


23 


I “Yes: is it not?” returned madame 
I with equanimity. 

j But she caught the accent all the same, 
and scored it in her mental notebook. 

I After some pleasant feminine play be- 
tween Mrs. Birkett and madame respect- 
I ing the care of the infant in the mother’s 
i absence — the one desiring to keep it, the 
other afraid of giving trouble — it was at 
! last agreed that madame should go off 
now at once with Mr. Birkett to see Lion- 
net, poor Miss Snelling’s little house, 
which the rector and his wife so much 
desired she should find suitable for her 
I home. Truly the stars were fighting for 
i her in their courses, as she said. Things 
were indeed almost too easy. 

With a strange superstitious feeling, and 
vaguely remembering the way of witches 
whereof she had heard — how the Lady 
Geraldine bore herself when she came 
to the castle of Sir Leoline, as had once 
been read to her by one she then loved 
— madame sprained her ankle just as 
they reached the threshold, and the rec- 
tor lifted her over in his arms. 

“I consider this equivalent to your 
giving me possession,’’ she said prettily, 
looking into his face as she made a few 
halting steps through the little hall and 
shook off her sprain at the drawing-room 
door. 

The upshot of the survey was that 
Madame de Montfort agreed to take the 
cottage if Mr. Dundas, whose property 
it was, would accept her as a tenant ; 
to which Mr. Birkett set his shoulders 
square and said, “Accept you as a ten- 
ant! I should like to see him refuse.’’ 

She did not agree to take the place 
precipitately, only by degrees yielding 
her objections to confined space, low 
ceilings, want of spare bedrooms for 
friends, and the like ; but ultimately 
yielding in favor of the advantages ac- 
cruing from a low rent, light taxes, love- 
ly view, healthy situation, the glimpse 
of Dunaston Castle to the east, the fine 
outline of the rocks bounding the gorge, 
and vague “availability ’’ — whatever that 
might mean. She did not give the rector 
the idea of a person seizing eagerly at a 
thing, and therefore a pdrson without a 
background or' an anchorage — a bit of 


social driftweed as poor in friends as in 
circumstances ; which has a bad appear- 
ance, and gives room for suspicion and 
disrespect ; but she consented to apply 
for Lionnet only after due reflection and 
with a certain dignity and self-sacrifice 
very remarkable — her child always her 
first consideration, and her own wishes 
set to the side and subordinated to this. 
In the end, however, she consented, and 
returned to the rectory the future tenant 
of Lionnet should Mr. Dundas, to whom 
the rector wrote, agree to accept her on 
her own representations and Mr. Birkett’s 
security, offered without hesitation. 

Mr. Dundas was not slow in respond- 
ing. The rector’s note took him by sur- 
prise, for he had not yet heard of the 
arrival which had set tongues in North 
Aston wagging as nothing had moved 
them in this generation since Mrs. Dun- 
das had first shown herself in a high 
comb and mantilla. Not quite under- 
standing what it all meant, he rode off 
to the rectory with speed, and was intro- 
duced as madame was discussing her 
plans with Mr. and Mrs. Birkett, hear- 
ing where she could get servants, who 
would best suit her for a gardener, how 
she could set herself up in this and that 
— flowers, vegetables, poultry, a cow, a 
carriage, a cart, pigs and horses being 
among the items named. 

“Madame de Montfort, let me intro- 
duce to you your future landlord,’’ said 
the rector, presenting Mr. Dundas. 

Madame looked up, smiled sweetly, 
bowed gracefully. “I hope we shall 
come to terms, sir,’’ she said in a charm- 
ing, half-foreign way. 

“We have already,’’ answered Mr. 
Dundas, to whose wildest dreams such 
a heavenly tenant as this had never 
presented itself. 

More talk followed on this relating to 
rent, lease, conditions and the like ; in 
all of which Mr. Dundas was utterly 
unbusiness-like and entirely satisfactory. 
She might take the whole thing on her 
own terms : it really was a matter of so 
little importance to him he did not care 
what she did or paid, provided she made 
herself happy and comfortable in the 
place. He would give her an agreement 


24 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


wherein he would bind himself not to 
disturb her, but give her the power, of 
quitting at any moment she might like. 
In fact, he was a perfect Jupiter of a 
landlord, and she would honor him if 
she would but consent to be his residen- 
tial Danae, and accept the golden show- 
er he was only too willing to outpour. 

To all of which she gave a graceful 
and yet very dignified adhesion, dwelling 
much on his rights, but finally accepting 
his proposals, and ending the discussion 
as the tenant of Lionnet, holding posses- 
sion by her own will only, and bound to 
pay the most moderate amount of rent 
Mr. Dundas could ask without showing 
her too plainly that he wished to make it 
easy for her. “As I am a stranger, and 
can give you no local references of any 
kind,” then said madame with a height- 
ened color, “ perhaps it will be more sat- 
isfactory to both sides if I pay a quarter’s 
rent in advance.” 

She put her hand into her pocket and 
pulled out her purse. 

“By no means — certainly not,” said 
Mr. Dundas, pressing back her hand. 
“ I shall consider myself affronted if you 
attempt such a thing.” 

She smiled. “As you like,” she an- 
swered. “If you like to trust me, I 
have nothing to say against it. I only 
thought you might wish to be on the safe 
side.” 

“I am that as it is,” said Mr. Dundas. 

To which she answered simply, “Yes, 
I know that you are, but you do not.” 

The sound of wheels came up to the 
door : voices were heard in the hall. 
Adelaide, starting up, went forward with 
a certain exaggerated tumultuousness of 
affection and familiarity, to show that 
she was bored here and had no part 
in what was going on ; and the rector, 
looking at his wife, said, “The Harrowby 
girls, my dear.” 

The door opened and two ladies en- 
tered. At this moment Madame de 
Montfort slightly started and shivered, 
but her placid face showed no signs of 
emotion, though it was even paler than 
usual when she lifted it at the introduc- 
tion. 

“Madame de Montfort, allow me to 


present to you Miss Harrowby and Miss 
Josephine Harrowby,” said the rector as 
if on parade. 

And madame, half rising, smiled and 
bowed as gracefully as usual, her eyes, 
with the pupils dilated, glancing at the 
girls sharply, and her skin still congealed 
from that shivering start she had experi- 
enced. But people often shiver, especi- 
ally after a journey, so there was nothing 
very wonderful in that. Even Adelaide, 
on the lookout for unfavorable indica- 
tions of all kinds, was forced to acknow- 
ledge the entire unreasonableness of at- 
tempting to find any meaning in such 
an automatic action. Besides, what kind 
of relation could this stranger have with 
her friends the Harrowbys.^ 

For all that, she did give a slight start 
and shiver when they were announced, 
and she was paler than her wont, and 
her eyes were keener and larger and 
darker when she looked at them. How 
white she was, and how bright the flash 
of her eyes when Josephine Harrowby, 
sitting near her, admired the baby and 
crooned over it ! 

“Are you fond of babies?” asked 
madame, quietly as to manner, but still 
pale and intense in face. 

“Passionately,” said Josephine with a 
yearning look. 

Madame rose and laid the child in her 
arms: “You look like a mourning Ma- 
donna in your gray mantle and with 
your brown hair,” she said. “ Quite a 
picture.” 

Josephine blushed. 

“There, Josephine! There’s a com- 
pliment for you,” said the rector, laugh- 
ing. 

Josephine laughed too, the better to 
hide her embarrassment, for madame 
and the rector together had drawn all 
eyes on her, and Mr. Dundas looked 
with the rest. 

For want of a safer retreat she bent 
her flushed face over the child and kissed 
it; then asked, “What is its name?” 
earnestly, as if the answer was really of 
importance. 

“Fina,” said madame; “ or rather” — 
correcting herself — “ Josephine.” 

“How odd!” cried Josephine, blush- 



“‘BY NO MEANS— CERTAINLY NOT.”' 


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THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS, 


25 


ing yet more deeply, “ Why, that is my 
name !” 

“Is it?” said madame, arching her 
eyebrows. “ What an extraordinary co- 
incidence ! My dear husband would 


have called the whole thing a dedication 
— the picture, the name, the likeness. 
His name,” she added with a slight com- 
pression of her lips, “was Joseph.” 


\ 



JPJis^lE^T XX, 


CHAPTER V. 

AT THE HILL. 

A SMALL country society like that 
of North Aston receives 'with un- 
bounded hospitality or rejects 'with un- 
conquerable suspicion a new-comer of 
proper appearance not fully accredited. 
Either the tedium of life carries it over 
ordinary caution, and people are glad to 
w-elcome any break in the monotony un- 
der which minds are rusting and hearts 
are withering, or the desire to remain 
safe in the narrow fastnesses of the 
known is stronger than the yearning for 
enlarged experience, which may have its 
dangers. Hence strangers without vouch- 
ers are assimilated greedily or repudiated 
crudely ; and the one process is often- 
times as disastrous in the end as the 
other. 

Fortunately for the present success of 
Madame de Montfort’s plans, whatever 
they might be. North Aston, led by the 
rector, made up its mind as a commu- 
nity to receive her on her own creden- 
tials and his sponsorship ; to suspect 
nothing of what might lie concealed, and 
to give full value to all the charms and 
graces that were evident. 

Mrs. Harrowby, on hearing the report 
of the day’s “find” from her daughters, 
did certainly look doubtful, saying with 
emphasis, “ I am sorry for it : we have had 
enough of foreigners here meaning 
Mrs. Dundas and her heathenisms, which 
time neither softened nor destroyed. 

Still, taken by the hand as madame 
was by both Mr. and Mrs. Birkett, Mrs. 
Harrowby’s vague dissatisfaction went 
for nothing, even though she was Mrs. 
Harrowby of the Hill ; and madame 
found her order of admittance easy to 
obtain, and her path to the small North 
Astonian penetralia made marvelously 
smooth. 

Then she gained no small amount of 
social glory, if also some amount of 
blame, by the mode in which she trim- 
26 


med and arranged her little place. She 
made it the prettiest, daintiest doll’s 
house to be found in the whole country, 
and fulfilled the rector’s generalized sug- 
gestion of availability with a perfectness 
which he himself never expected. And 
he was of those who hoped all things 
from madame, and believed no less than 
he hoped. 

Here she built up a rustic verandah, 
there threw out a picturesque conserva- 
tory ; flowers and flowering bushes were 
planted by the cartload, till the whole 
place was like a picture for color and a 
flower -farm for perfume. The rooms 
were decorated in patterns, tints and 
methods quite out of the ordinary North 
Astonian beat, and therefore much can- 
vassed. These decorations, indeed, made 
almost a schism in the place, one side 
liking the drawing-roofii paper of flat 
blue-green, with the high dado of that 
indeterminate hue which goes by the 
name of peacock-blue, and the other 
side calling it ugly and eccentric. But 
madame got the greater number of votes 
in her favor on the whole ; for the gen- 
tlemen were with her to a man, and 
made the ladies understand that their 
want of admiration was the result of 
prejudice and narrow brains and a sign 
of their mental inferiority generally. The 
ladies, on their side, admitted the good 
ifaste of the muslin curtains, lined with 
delicately-tinted tarlatane and looped up 
with broad bows of ribbons to match, 
which she had hung wherever they could 
be hung, and the worked muslin squares 
for antimacassars, pinned on to the chairs 
with sash ribbons, were also generally 
approved of as improvements. These 
were matters more within their natural 
range, and whereon the gentlemen al- 
lowed them to have their own opinions 
undisturbed ; though here again Mrs. 
Harrowby shot her little shafts of dissent, 
for the home target only, and said dis- 
dainfully after their first state visit, when 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


Josephine was enthusiastic and she wish- 
I ed to restrain her excessive eulogy, “Yes, 
pretty enough in a way, but too much 
j like a milliner’s shop to please me. In- 
deed, Madame de Montfbrt is too much 
j like a milliner all through for my taste.” 
i And Mrs. Corfield, looking round on 
* this billowy expanse of muslin, put in 
briskly, as her demurrer of good coun- 
sel : “I should take these curtains and 
things down for every day if I were you, 
madame, and put them up, if you must 
at all, only for grand occasions. They 
will cost you a fortune in washing else, 
and that stupid Mary Warren will tear 
them to rags before you know where you 
are.” 

Letting these little notes of dissidence 
pass, when the whole thing was complete 
no one could deny that it was a success, 
or say that Lionnet was other than “the 
most perfect little gem of its kind,” as 
the rector used to declare a dozen times 
a day with the air of a man who has 
created something for which the world 
owes him gratitude, and who has the 
right, therefore, to be always holding 
out his hand for payment. And as it 
was a success, even with the blue-green 
walls and the green- blue dado, its clever 
mistress gained a certain flavor of re- 
nown, amounting almost to a moral vir- 
tue, from the fact that her house was 
picturesquely arranged and her rooms 
quaintly furnished, and that she had 
given the other housekeepers of North 
Aston a few new ideas in the way of 
assorting colors and hanging breadths 
of muslin. 

Madame la Marquise had been at North 
Aston about six weeks now, of which the 
last two had been passed in her own 
house. All the ladies save Mrs. Dundas 
had called on her. They had waited 
until Lionnet was reported to be finished 
and she ready to receive, and had then 
left their cards as the official act of reg- 
istration demanded by the proprieties. 
She had seen and been introduced to 
each in turn at the rectory, but there she 
had been only a gue.st, holding a reflect- 
ed, not an individual, position, the rector 
bearing the sole burden of responsibility. 
Now each family took its share in the 


27 

plunge, and for good or ill she was ac- 
cepted as one of themselves. 

The second stage in the little conven- 
tional process of initiation to be gone 
through would be her own return visits ; 
the third, the set dinners that would be 
given in her honor when her mourning 
should be sufficiently mitigated to allow 
her To enter into state amusements; the 
fourth, her own acknowledgment in kind. 
Afterward she would be exactly niched 
and tabulated according to her deserving, 
and drop from a phenomenon into a cir- 
cumstance. Some of the ladies thought 
it was time she should so drop. They 
were tired of hearing Madame la Mar- 
quise de Montfort so continually discuss- 
ed and praised. 

The first place to which madame went 
on her round in her “landlord’s” car- 
riage was the Hill. Oddly enough, she 
was nervous about this visit. She always 
had been nervous with the Harrowbys, 
and especially with Mrs. Harrowby. 
When that lady had called at the rec- 
tory while she was there, she had turned 
even paler than when the young ladies 
were announced ; and when she praised 
the baby, which Mrs. Birkett was nursing 
as a matter of course, the usually placid 
marquise had trembled like a schoolgirl 
on her examination-day as, gracefully 
taking the child, she laid it in Mrs. Har- 
rowby’s arms, and heard her say as if to 
herself musingly, “What a pretty little 
thing ! Of whom does it remind me, I 
wonder? I cannot think.” 

On which, recovering herself — for 
trembling was not much in madame’s 
way — she had said with her pleasant 
smile, “She ought to remind you of one 
of your own children, for she has the 
same name, Josephine.” 

Nothing since then had occurred to 
destroy the odd embarrassment always 
felt by madame in the presence of Mrs. 
Harrowby, as nothing had occurred to 
soften the vague distrust which Mrs. 
Harrowby felt for madame ; and the visit 
of registration had been paid and was 
now to be returned, things remaining in 
the same condition of armed neutrality 
as before, Mrs. Harrowby knowing that 
madame wanted to conciliate her, and 


28 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


madame knowing in her turn that Mrs. 
Harrowby distrusted her and would not 
be conciliated. 

The Hill was a large old-fashioned 
country-house approached by a magnif- 
icent double avenue of horse-chestnuts, 
and surrounded by a stately garden laid 
out in the formal terraces and parterres 
of Queen Anne’s time. Within, it had 
a great deal of heavy furniture, mostly 
ugly, set in inconvenient places, and a 
general expression of dinginess and 
wealth consequent on generations of 
possession and an inherited quality of 
family conservatism. It would have been 
against the Harrowby traditions to have 
remodeled or modernized anything be- 
longing to them ; and the result was by 
no means lively. 

At the present moment there was an 
unmistakable look of dullness about the 
place, the inevitable result of the death 
of the head. The old chief had gone 
and the young one was absent, and the 
sole representatives of power were the 
widowed mother and maiden sisters, who 
had none. Things went on as they had 
always gone on from the motive-force 
belonging to the accumulated habits of 
years, but there was no spring, no life, 
no growth in the place, and everything 
was at a kind of rusty standstill, wherein 
nothing moved but the rust, and that 
increased. 

So it would be till Edgar should return 
and put himself at the head of affairs. 
Why he had joined his regiment instead 
of selling out and coming home, as the 
only proper place for him on his father’s 
death, no one ever knew. It had offend- 
ed his mother gravely at the time, and 
she had told him her mind, as was her 
wont. But though her son had been re- 
spectful enough in his reply, he had kept 
to his plans and offered no reason that 
carried conviction with it. There was 
evidently some mystery connected with 
this sudden and inconvenient resolve of 
his ; and even if Mrs. Harrowby had 
wished to penetrate it, she would not 
have been able : it was like hewing at a 
stone wall with a straw to try conclusions 
with Edgar when his mind was made up, 
and those only who could read small 


print through the traditional milestone 
could see into his motives or his actions 
if he wished them hidden. 

The consequences of his absence, how- 
ever, were the beginning of all sorts of 
small frays and fractures in the well- 
ordered fabric 'of the Hill property, and 
a general look of moribund grandeur 
about the old place, dingy, dignified, sub- 
stantial, but evidently needing manipu- 
lation with new brooms. 

It was the greatest possible contrast to 
madame’s airy fairy little palace of light 
and color, her doll’s house of picturesque 
arrangements and ingenious makeshifts. 
Size apart, her miniature Lionnet was far 
more charming to her than this dingy 
old Hill, and more in consonance with 
her tastes and habits. Nevertheless, her 
heart leapt within her, her cheeks flamed 
suddenly and as suddenly the color faded, 
her eyes sparkled with a bright metallic 
lustre that made them harder and more 
inscrutable than ever, as, looking up to 
the gray old mansion standing in the 
sunlight at the end of the blossoming 
avenue — that avenue which was the pride 
of the country and the show-place for 
miles round — she said something to her- 
self in a low voice, whereof the nurse 
sitting opposite with the child heard only 
one word above the crunching gravel : 
“Mine!” 

Mrs. Harrowby was at home, and Ma- 
dame la Marquise de Montfort was ush- 
ered through the lofty hall, the walls of 
which were decorated with buffaloes’ 
heads and royal antlers, brushes. New 
Zealand and North American Indian 
weapons, rare birds that had fallen to 
the master’s gun in foreign parts, and 
models of monstrous fish that had come 
upon his hook — in short, the Usual tro- 
phies and ornaments of a country gen- 
tleman’s hall ; through the long, closely- 
carpeted passage set thick with quaint 
curiosities ; through the ante-room made 
dangerous by obtrusive piles of fine old 
china, and into the inner drawing-room 
where the ladies sat. 

She was by no means flushed or spark- 
ling now. Indeed, she was so deadly 
white that Mrs. Harrowby’s first move- 
ment was one of compassion, fearing she 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


was about to faint ; but her smooth voice 
and perfect self-possession of bearing re- 
assured the lady, so that she greeted her, 
as she would have greeted any other 
stranger, with good breeding, but coldly. 
Josephine was the only one who gave her 
hand a frank press or looked into her 
face with anything like friendly interest 
in her own. 

Josephine had “taken to” her; and 
what can you do against a girl’s fascina- 
i tion with only such a broken weapon as 
a vague surmise of evil and a baseless 
I dislike, you cannot tell why ? Mrs. Har- 
rowby was annoyed that her youngest 
daughter had found madame so fasci- 
nating, but she was powerless to change 
her for the present, and she only hoped 
no ill would come of it. 

After the welcoming greetings were 
over, they all sat down and began to 
discuss that aspect of Shakespeare and 
the mus'ical glasses which was proper to 
the occasion. And the first thing which 
madame did was to praise the avenue. 
She thought that if there was safe ground 
anywhere, here at least she should be 
free of pitfalls. 

Mrs. Harrowby, though immensely 
proud of this avenue, did not somehow 
care for Madame de Montfort’s praises. 
“It is nothing so very wonderful,” she 
said coldly. “ It is not better than Bushey 
Park.” 

“It seems odd to me that any mere 
private house can bear such a compari- 
son — can be ranked, indeed, anywhere 
near a royal palace,” said madame 
sweetly. 

“Evidently you have not seen many 
of our great houses,” returned Mrs. Har- 
rowby disagreeably. 

“Are there many with double avenues 
of horse-chestnut?” asked madame with 
graceful simplicity. 

Mrs. Harrowby looked much annoyed. 
“Have you seen Chatsworth?” she ask- 
ed, retreating in good order. 

“Yes,” answered madame. “It is very 
fine, the park and gardens — everything 
on a magnificent scale. Still,” reflective- 
ly, “ I don’t remember any double avenue 
of horse-chestnuts.” 

“ I should have scarcely thought you 


29 

so literal, madame,” said Mrs. Harrowby 
with a dry cough. 

“No? Nor am I to everyone; but 
there are certain people whom one takes 
literally : people who speak fast and 
heedlessly one passes by, but the literal 
talkers seem to require the same kind of 
hearers.” 

Madame said this very nicely, making 
it a compliment by implication so far as 
manner went ; but Mrs. Harrowby moved 
uneasily on her seat. She felt the sar- 
casm through the flattering manner, and 
all the more as it was delivered in a form 
she could not resent. 

Some family portraits were hanging 
round the room. Madame’s quick eyes 
had noted the fact as she came in, but 
she had not looked at them more atten- 
tively after that one hurried glance of 
entrance. They were of all kinds. Here 
was an ancestor in a cannon-curled wig 
and long flowered waistcoat ; here the 
ancestress corresponding in high-rolled 
powdered hair, peaked stomacher and 
hoops ; there was the late Mr. Harrowby 
when a young man, with a curl on his 
forehead and in the high-collared blue 
coat and tight nankeens of the period ; 
and in the companion panel hung Mrs. 
Harrowby when a young woman, her 
head turned over her bare shoulder to 
the left, with ringlets parted on one side, 
gigot sleeves, and shoes with sandals 
plainly shown beneath her short and 
narrow gown. Over the piano were to 
be seen the three Misses Harrowby, done 
in chalks, when little girls; over the door 
was the picture of two boys in Highland 
costume, Edgar and Frank. There they 
were again — Edgar in his cadet’s uniform, 
Frank in his college cap and gown ; and 
here, again, Edgar in his full captain’s 
regimentals as he looked just before he 
sailed for India, and Frank as a young 
gentleman of fashion for the rising gene- 
ration to laugh at in their turn, as Frank 
himself had often laughed at his father’s 
high collar and nankeen tights. Both 
were considered good likenesses. 

So said Mrs. Harrowby when, seeing 
madame looking at the portraits of her- 
self and husband, she profited by the 
occasion to withdraw altogether from 


30 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


that unlucky discussion on chestnut ave- 
nues, and threw the conversational ball 
to another quarter. “ Have you seen 
those, madame — my sons Edgar and 
Francis?” she asked. “They are admi- 
rably done, and admirable likeaesses.” 

Madame gave a perceptible movement : 
it was not a start nor a shiver ; it looked 
like that thing people call a thrill. For a 
second she looked down, and her breath 
seemed to come by an effort. Then, 
raising her eyes with a certain fixedness 
that did not seem quite natural, she turn- 
ed them full on the pictures indicated, 
and said quietly, “They look good por- 
traits ; ” adding with her smooth flattering 
air, “and sons to be proud of, I should 
think.” 

“Oh,” cried out Josephine impulsively, 
“you would say that if you knew Edgar.” 

“They both seem nice,” said madame , 
with a sudden flush and an inexplicable 
confusion in her face — so visibly and so 
much confused that Mrs. Harrowby look- 
ed at her keenly, a flush of terror in her 
own. 

Then said Madame la Marquise de 
Montfort, her lips quivering and genuine 
tears in her eyes, “You must think me 
very foolish, dear Mrs. Harrowby — ” 
Mrs. Harrowby winced at the familiar 
endearment of the epithet — “but the por- 
trait of your eldest son has reminded me 
so powerfully of my poor husband, I can- 
not pretend not to feel it, and I cannot 
conceal my emotion. It was just his 
air — ^just his look.” 

The dainty handkerchief went up to 
her eyes, and she suppressed a little sob 
that was not affected. 

“Which do you think my eldest ?” ask- 
ed Mrs. Harrowby, still with that look of 
vague terror in her face, but now with a 
certain stern watchfulness superadded. 

“You have told me yourself,” answered 
madame tremulously : “your son Edgar.” 

“Yet it is not a French face at all,” 
said the mother. “It is a purely Eng- 
lish face and a purely English character.” 

“ My dear husband had English blood 
in him,” said madame more composedly. 

“ He was indeed more like an English- 
man than a Frenchman, and I often used 
to tell him so. You see no trace of what 


we mean by the French physiognomy in 
my little Fina ?” 

“ No, no, none ; certainly not — most 
strangely not,” said Mrs. Harrowby with 
almost cruel emphasis. 

“ No,” replied madame, “there is none 
to see.” 

After this the conversation drifted on 
to other topics ; and in due time madame 
took her graceful leave and went farther 
on her round. 

“ How could I be such an idiot ?” was 
her voiceless self-reproach as she drove 
down the avenue. “ I thought I had 
nerved myself too well for this. But I 
got out of it cleverly, and I do not think 
she suspected me. Perhaps, indeed, I 
made a good stroke — a fluke if I did. I 
must be more cautious for the future, 
however, and not let myself be caught 
so foolishly again. Thank Heaven, the 
worst is over now till he comes back !” 

On her side, Mrs. Harrowby, in reply 
to Josephine’s enthusiastic “ Now, mam- 
itfa, is she not charming?” gave, as her 
deliberate conviction, this dictum : “My 
dear girl, what Madame de Montfort 
really is I do not know, nor who M. de 
Montfort was ; but of this I feel sure : 
there is something very odd about her, 
and something that I do not like at all. 
I say nothing against her character, be- 
cause I know nothing ; but if I had had 
my way, we should have had a detective 
down from London and have learnt all 
about her before we accepted her. I 
hinted as much to Mr. Birkett, but I 
think she has bewitched him like some 
others,” with a displeased look at Jose- 
phine. “At all events, I don’t like her; 
and though I am obliged to visit her, as 
every one else does, I do not trust her, 
and I wish she had never come into the 
place. That is all I have to say.” 

“Mamma, you are not just,” remon- 
strated Josephine with a burning face. 
“I have never known you so unchari- 
table before.” 

“ Hush, Josephine !” said Fanny in a 
reproving voice: “you should not speak 

SO. 

“ Josephine, how can you be so imper- 
tinent to mamma ?” echoed Maria ; while 
Mrs. Harrowby said, illogically but an- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


grily, “ If this is the consequence of your 
j sudden friendship for Madame de Mont- 
j fort, how can you expect that I should 
I like her, Josephine ? I am ashamed of 
I you ! taking part in this manner with a 
stranger against your own mother !” 


CHAPTER VI. 

FOR AND AGAINST. 

It was the fashion in North Aston 
to praise Madame de Montfort in pub- 
lic, though in private there were more 
dissentients than confessed themselves 
openly. Mr. and Mrs. Birkett, however, 
were genuine in their admiration, and 
the warmest of her friends. She had 
fascinated the rector — all in honor and 
sobriety of feeling be it understood, in 
nowise trenching on his loyalty to his 
wife or giving her cause for uneasiness. 
Still, it was fascination, and he did not 
deny it. But Adelaide held aloof, and 
“declined to discuss madame ’’ when the 
past and real personality of that enig- 
matic lady came on the carpet, as it 
always did whenever two or three were 
in conclave together. And her reticence 
had an ugly look and caused remarks. 
But her parents had censured her so se- 
verely in the beginning when she had 
questioned the entire satisfactoriness of 
their new favorite that she had taken the 
lesson to heart, and now sat silent and 
disdainful when madame was made the 
central point of social interest. She was 
disdainful indeed about the whole affair, 
and wondered where her father’s perspi- 
cacity and her mother’s instincts had 
gone. She never for a moment faltered 
in her own belief that madame was an 
adventuress, and she accepted her title 
as she would have accepted the account 
of a materialized spirit. But as all this 
was less from true perception than from 
the jealousy of sex and exclusiveriess of 
condition characteristic of her, her man- 
ifest dislike had not much influence in 
the place, and people only said among 
themselves, “ How wretchedly Miss Bir- 
kett gets on at home !’’ and, “What bad 
taste it is in Adelaide to show the world 
how much she dislikes Madame de Mont- 


31 

fort, when her father and mother have 
taken her up so warmly !’’ 

For the rest, the Fairbairns had re- 
ceived the new-comer with the facile ac- 
ceptance of good-natured indifference. 
They, did not become intimate with her, 
because they were not intimate with any 
one — so large a family as theirs was in- 
dependent of outsiders — but they were 
always smiling and friendly to madame 
when they met,' and suspected nothing, 
because they did not give themselves the 
trouble to think or compare. 

Of the Harrowbys, as we know, Mrs. 
Harrowby distrusted her, but was too 
cautious to say so in public. She con- 
tented herself with home objurgations, 
which relieved her mind and did not 
commit her to an embarrassing course. 
The elder two daughters were half 
charmed and half repelled — the former 
in madame’s society, the latter in her ab- 
sence when they dissected and considered 
her — but Josephine was honestly in love 
with her, and cared for nothing so much 
as to be with her, worshiping her as 
simple-minded, loving-hearted girls do 
worship older women better versed than 
themselves in the grammar of fascination. 

The Corfields were tepid. The doctor 
laughed in his sleeve at her dyed hair 
and well-arranged face, marvelously well 
done, but he did not betray her even to 
his wife. It was no business of his, he 
thought : why should he be the one to 
make her eat dirt ? And as she was an 
amenable kind of person in speech, and 
took all Mrs. Corfield’s recommendations 
amicably, with promises of obedience, 
that good fussy soul for her own part was 
naturally more prepossessed in her favor 
than not, and Alick thought her more 
like a Zenobia than she was. 

But no one had gone down before her 
in such unquestioning worship as Mr. 
Dundas, her landlord, though no one 
hated her so much or said it- so openly 
as Pepita, whose ill word counted for the 
enemy. Hitherto the standing feud of 
the place had been between Pepita and 
Adelaide, as indeed how should it not 
between such discordant elements? A 
violent and undisciplined savage, with- 
out principles, reticence or the sense of 


32 the atonement 

social decorum, there must needs be en- 
mity between her and a conventional 
English lady whose pulses never quick- 
ened with emotion, whose thoughts and 
affections — passions she had none — were 
under the strictest discipline of the cold- 
est reason, to whom the alpha and omega 
of morality were the conventional pro- 
prieties of English middle-class life, and 
who despised all that was not English 
save Parisian millinery and Italian art. 
Pepita had hated Adelaide because of 
her coldness, her English ladyhood and 
her English prejudices; and Adelaide 
had hated Pepita because of her fury, 
her Spanish habits and her Spanish 
prejudices. Now they buried their own 
long-used hatchet in the grave of a joint 
animosity to madame, and even drew 
together in some show of alliance that 
they might the better smite her. 

They met with their match in Madame 
de Montfort, who knew the art of saying 
disagreeable things in a pleasant man- 
ner, and the value of showing the power 
of fight when needed, though her gov- 
erning policy was one of conciliation. 
With all Adelaide Birkett’s self-control, 
she had more intelligence and more 
experience ; and with less raw material 
of beauty than Mrs. Dundas, she had a 
better style and greater charm. Hence 
she carried society with her when she 
came to close quarters with her enemies, 
and always contrived to turn their guns 
against themselves. 

And then she was fresh, and the North 
Astonians had got accustomed to each 
other and palled with Pepita. The Span- 
iard was gorgeous and magnificent truly, 
but she was always the same; and when 
you had once seen her dressed for the 
evening, with her high comb, her falling 
lace mantilla half concealing the knot 
of crimson ribbon in her gummed hair 
that became her so well, her handsome 
face — handsome still if disfigured by its 
coarse paint — looking out from the soft- 
ening folds like the face of a many-flesh- 
ed and much-bedaubed Melpomene, you 
had seen her always. She never varied — 
was never more than a grand bit of wax- 
work for her quieter days, or a very vul- 
gar Maenad for the more disturbed, when 


OF TEAM DUNDAS. 

the blood was in her brain to excess, and 
her temper suffered in consequence. But 
Madame de Montfort, if also in a certain 
sense always the sailie for sweetness and 
placidity, was in another always new. 
If her tact and gentleness never varied, 
her conversation did, having ever some 
fresh sparkle of anecdote or description, 
some enlivening talk that made her the 
most delightful companion possible. She 
knew so many famous people, and so 
much about them, that she was real food 
to the hungry minds of North Aston, 
bound by circumstance to social famine. 
And she did not rush out all her know- 
ledge at a breath, but kept it in reserve 
judiciously, detailing only in detached 
bits those circumstances of varied travel 
or celebrated companionship which she 
thought would interest and amuse. It 
was really quite an education to talk to 
madame ; and if sometimes she made 
slips and confounded her friend Stonewall 
Jackson with her next-to-father Abraham 
Lincoln, or gave Bismarck’s policy — told 
her in confidence — to Bunsen’s private 
confessions, who could blame her ? Mem- 
ory is proverbially treacherous, and why 
not hers with others ? She was pleasant 
— that was the primary fact to be dealt 
with : the secondary was, that she laid 
herself out to charm the women quite 
as well as the men, which was amiable, 
seeing that the men so openly adored 
her, and that the women admired her 
only by exceptions. Hitherto, the gen- 
tlemen had devoted themselves to Mrs. 
Dundas on those occasions when she 
appeared among them, partly because 
she was handsome, and partly because 
their wives were afraid of her ; but now 
Madame la Marquise reigned the local 
queen, and the Andalusian was deposed. 
Juno, splendid, but stupid and a terma- 
gant, was nowhere when Venus, gracious, 
soft and subtle, took the reins in her 
hand and drove her chariot to the win- 
ning post ; which did not tend to make 
Juno more pleasant to her rival. 

Then madame broke the dull uniform- 
ity of North Astonianilm so delightfully. 
She .gave charming and informal re- 
tmions which kept every one alive — so 
charming and informal as not to seem 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


33 


out of place with her fresh crape and 
her widow’s cap, and to which even Mrs. 
Harrowby, also in her weeds, went with 
the rest. This too counted in her favor, 
for she substituted elegance for expense, 
and so did not come into competition 
with the older inhabitants, who had 
placed their faith in profusion. Her age, 
as she allowed it, was twenty-three, and 
in some lights she looked less, if in others 
considerably more. This was natural, as 
she must have begun life early to carry 
all her experiences fitly. She sometimes 
made her hearers look at each other 
when her stories were fuller than usual 
of chronological marvel, but she gene- 
rally contrived to clamp her anecdote 
with some unanswerable fact and to soft- 
en down its more startling lines, so that 
she sailed out of the strait with flying 
colors and left her audience only the 
wrack of an abortive suspicion. 

“ She certainly does tell the most ex- 
traordinary stories of places and people 
that she has seen and known,” Mrs. 
Harrowby used to say to her daughters. 
” One wonders who she can be herself, 
to have met with all these great people. 
We cannot say she tells untruths, be- 
cause we know nothing about her one 
way or the other ; still, I for one do not 
believe her, and I do not wish you, my 
dears, to be too intimate with her or to 
rely too much on her veracity. Girls 
like you cannot be too particular.” 

In spite of which warning, Josephine 
— good-natured and affectionate Jose- 
phine, her brother Edgar’s favorite and 
never weary of talking of him — was 
often at Lionnet. Madame had subju- 
gated her as she had subjugated the 
rector and her landlord. The dedica- 
tion of the baby had touched her yearn- 
ing heart ; and was not Sebastian Dun- 
das, the object of her innocent devotion, 
daily at Lionnet, in his quality of land- 
lord ministering to the needs of a valued 
tenant ? 

A man of misleading imagination and 
irritable nerves, whose fancy ran on ex- 
citement and whose temper demanded 
quiet, Mr. Dundas was one of those men 
whose life is always at odds with their 
desires. What satisfies the one part 
3 


starves the other, and that which is 
starved is always that which is most 
imperative and most important. Before 
he married he had lost his soul in reve- 
ries on ‘‘burning orbs” and ‘‘beautiful 
tigresses after he married he thought 
that the dullest and most prosaic hen- 
wife, whose poetry translated itself in 
pickles and preserves, and whose hero- 
ism was the hefoism of a patient, plod- 
ding, domestic drudge, would have been 
infinitely more his ideal than this superb 
creature of fire and torment, beauty and 
disgust. Glorious eyes and peach-like 
skin, the supple grace of a leopard and 
the exciting nature of a tigress, fantastic 
dress and unusual ornament, are all very 
well in the early days and before famil- 
iarity has led to satiety. In time, meals 
served with punctuality and composed 
of food fit for a Christian gentleman’s 
digestion, days passed in peace, and the 
handy articles of furniture lying about 
not converted into missiles sent flying at 
your head, nights given to sleep and free 
from raving hysterics and small white 
teeth gnawing at your arms like a wild 
beast at a bone, language purged of ep- 
ithets of more force than delicacy, — in 
time all these are more to the purpose of 
rational life than love at high pressure 
and admiration at white heat. And so 
Mr. Dundas found to his cost when his 
dream of Spanish romance faded and 
he woke to the pitiless daylight of a 
wrecked and wretched English home. 
But for the not very elevated feeling that 
he should leave Pepita triumphant and 
be her victim to the end, he would prob- 
ably have put a bullet through his head 
years ago. Had he had a drop of South- 
ern blood in him, he would have put one 
through hers. 

The suavity and repose of Madame 
de Montfort acted, then, like balm, like 
sleep, on his irritable nerves. He seemed 
to grow young again in her society, to be 
re-cast into something like his old self 
before domestic suffering had made him 
peevish and selfish. She drew him mag- 
netically, and calmed him into a state 
that looked almost like patience, and 
that was not far from forbearance ; of 
which Pepita had the benefit, as the wives 


34 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


of men made happy out of the home not 
infrequently find. All time seemed to be 
lost that was not passed with madame, 
and as her landlord he took care that 
the greater part of it should be passed 
with her. 

Though the rector, who regarded ma- 
dame as his spiritual ewe-lamb, did not 
like Sebastian’s frequent presence at 
Lionnet, he had no stable ground for 
remonstrance. Madame, tranquil and 
unruffled, was so superior to vulgar sus- 
picion, to self-condemnatory fear, it would 
be ungentlemanlike to even hint at cau- 
tion or displeasure ; and the rector prided 
himself on his gentlehood quite as much 
as on his sound theology — perhaps more. 
Besides, how can you insinuate precau- 
tions against doubtful behavior to a 
widow with her weeds still fresh and the 
name of her dear husband for ever on 
her lips ? It was an insult he could not 
offer her, even though he never paid a 
pastoral visit to Lionnet, which was pretty 
nearly every day, without finding Mr. 
Dundas installed there before him or 
seeing him arrive almost immediately 
after. Sebastian had, however, always 
good reasons for coming : now it was to 
assist madame to plan out a new flower- 
bed, and now to mount her water-colors, 
which she said were done, some by her- 
self and some by her husband. 

By the bye, their work was marvelously 
alike, and there was an odd confusion 
of signatures ; for if V. de M. stood in 
one corner, something else was sure to 
be discernible underneath, and the J. de 
M., which represented Joseph de Mont- 
fort, the late marquis, was written in ma- 
dame’s handwriting, as perhaps was nat- 
ural. No one but Mr. Dundas saw this, 
but he kept his counsel so loyally that 
even she never knew he had discovered 
the little discrepancy. 

Nevertheless, though there was, as we 
have seen, always a good reason for his 
being there, and though madame nev- 
er showed the slightest embarrassment 
when he came, but received him in the 
most natural manner in the world, and 
made it appear how his coming was to 
be accounted for, Mr. Birkett wished that 
he could give her a hint or that Sebastian 


had more consideration. Madame de 
Montfort was but a young woman yet, 
for all her savoir faire, and it would be 
a thousand pities if, in the innocence of 
her heart, she laid herself open to ill- 
natured gossip. Besides, Mrs. Dundas 
was such a dreadful creature. There was 
no knowing what fearful scandal might 
not arise if she took it into her head to 
be jealous and to make a scene. It quite 
fretted the rector. Was she not his 
charge ? and were not he and Mrs. Bir- 
kett specially responsible for her ? To be 
sure, Josephine Harrowby was often at 
Lionnet, but somehow this carried no 
comfort to Mr. Birkett. On the contrary, 
the idea of “those two women hanging 
about Dundas,’’ or sometimes “that con- 
ceited fellow of a Dundas making a fool 
of himself with those two women,’’ when 
he had left him master of the situation, 
as he was occasionally obliged to do, was 
intensely distasteful to him. But he kept 
his counsel, as Mr. Dundas had kept his, 
and not even to the wife of his bosom 
expressed his opinion that Madame la 
Marquise de Montfort allowed Sebastian 
to visit her too often, and that mischief 
would come of it if she was not careful. 

Thus three gentlemen of the place 
silently agreed to suppress facts which 
might have aroused suspicion if told, and 
so far made themselves the unconfessed 
tools of the clever comedian now playing 
her part among them. It was one of the 
things which men do for women when, 
if crafty, they are also clever — the wo- 
men who, while they deceive, take care to 
amuse — while they use are solicitous to 
flatter. The honest, who neither deceive 
nor flatter, seldom come off so well. 


CHAPTER VII. 

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER. 

Mrs. Dundas had not yet called per- 
sonally on madame. More than once 
her husband had left her card, accom- 
panied by some well-sounding word of 
apology, which madame had taken in 
good part and as if she believed it, 
though she knew quite well that after 
the first each successive card had been 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


35 


surreptitiously abstracted from Pepita’s 
filigree silver case, and that the apolo- 
gy was a coinage of Mr. Dundas’s own 
brain. She had been very gracious and 
amiable about it all, and had waived the 
ordinary ceremonial in the Spaniard’s 
favor — going to call on her first — with 
that frank sinking of small things which 
is the prerogative of the superior person. 
But after this introductory visit, when 
Pepita had felt constrained somehow to 
behave with unwonted decency, madame 
had not shown herself at Andalusia Cot- 
tage again. It was too much like ven- 
turing into the den of a wild beast to be 
an agreeable pastime ; and though she 
had come out safe from the initial en- 
counter, she did not care to try conclu- 
sions a second time. 

So here, too, things stood in that state 
of armed neutrality which means secret 
war, Madame la Marquise knowing that 
Mrs. Dundas suspected her of abstract 
evil to any extent, and not disinclined 
to supply her with concrete reasons in 
one direction, and Mrs. Dundas knowing 
that madame disliked her, and having 
no desire that it should be otherwise. 

One day, however, Mrs. Dundas, tak- 
ing no counsel with her husband, set out 
to Lion net, carrying Learn with her. 
Learn was now about fourteen, a tall, 
slender, brown girl, with a quantity of 
dark hair — not jet-black like her moth- 
er’s, but with some of the father’s gold 
on the edges when the sun shone across 
it, framing her sad face and drawn as 
a coronet above her melancholy brow ; 
with large pathetic eyes, and a fixed, sad 
mouth that neither smiled nor quivered, 
but that was always set to one expression 
of tragic immobility. It was a face prom- 
ising exquisite melodies of thought and 
feeling, eloquent of capacity for suffer- 
ing and intensity of love, but ds yet the 
reality fulfilled nothing of the promise. 
Those large, long-fringed, mournful eyes 
were like glorious gates leading to an 
empty chamber. The soul that seemed 
to look through them was only the shad- 
ow, the potentiality, not the thing itself. 
Sorrow she never knew, because she 
never knew joy ; thought was a thing as 
yet unborn in her unawakened brain ; 


she saw without understanding, lived 
without learning, and the beginning and 
end of her capacity for love was her 
mother. But here her love was intense 
— so intense that it touched on the bor- 
ders of heroism and was in itself a poem. 
Life had no other object for her, the uni- 
verse held no other centre, than that be- 
loved mother ; those flowers only were 
beautiful which her mother praised, those 
beings only sacred which her mother 
cherished ; she cared for no glory in the 
starry sky, no loveliness on the green 
earth, no thought of the soul of man, no 
knowledge, no desire which her mother 
passed by and disdained; no sage could 
have instructed her, no angel could have 
guided her, had her mother derided the 
learning of the one, the wisdom of the 
other ; and when she thought of God, 
she thought only of her mother as a 
man. The passion of race, too, bound 
her with a tie even stricter than natural 
instinct ; and nothing angered Learn so 
much as to call her English and like her 
father, as nothing brightened her to such 
near resemblance to pleasure as to say 
she was her mother’s miniature and a 
Spaniard of the true blood. 

Living between two parents who were 
confessed enemies, she had chosen her 
side, and this with no half-heartedness, 
no halting of the will. She loved the 
one partly with the blindness of instinct, 
partly with the pride of likeness, in some 
degree with the sense of dependence, in 
some with the sense of mutual isolation, 
and with a certain compelling sentiment 
of fear dominating all. But it was a fear 
that only drew her closer; for if the 
mother’s violence was extreme, so was 
her love ; if she struck, she caressed ; 
and children pass by the violence as a 
mere adjunct if they get the love as the 
substance. This was how she felt for 
the one : for the other she had the dis- 
dainful kind of hatred it was but natural 
she should feel, accustomed as she had 
been from her earliest infancy to play 
with a flaxen -wigged doll dressed in 
scarlet and black, with horns, hoofs 
and a tail, and called “El senor papa.’’ 
How should she not hate him? He 
was her mother’s oppressor, had light 


3 ^ 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


hair and blue eyes, was a Protestant and 
an Englishman : how, then, should she, 
a Spaniard and her mother’s daughter, 
love him ? The thing was out of nature, 
and Learn did not try to compass the 
impossible. 

Densely ignorant of all that it would 
have been good for her to know, Learn 
had learnt only two things to perfection 
— to keep silence and her own counsel. 
Silent and cautious as one living in an 
enemy’s camp and with a sacred cause 
to defend, she was at the same time des- 
titute of conscience and without a frag- 
ment of moral sense other than might 
be contained in her passionate fidelity to 
her mother. The words right and wrong 
were words having no meaning for her ; 
and she knew no barrier save material 
impossibility between herself and her 
desires. 

If she had no morality, neither had 
she any religious or spiritual life. Her 
cardinal point of religion, as Pepita had 
taught it, was to despise the English 
Church as heretical, and to hold that its 
doctrines, whatever they were, had been 
first taught by the great arch-fiend him- 
self. Her mother told her so; and of 
course if her mother said so it was true. 
She had an idea that English people be- 
lieved in nothing — neither in God nor in 
the devil, neither in the saints nor in 
heaven. Her mother used always to say 
that Protestants were pigs, good only to 
be roasted by slow fires, and that she 
wished the Holy Inquisition was estab- 
lished once again, that these heretic dogs 
might be burnt with their sins. As for 
the priesthood of Mr. Birkett or of mar- 
ried clergy in general, Pepita best ex- 
pressed her ideas thereon when she one 
day took the cat, tied round its neck a 
pair of paper bands, and a black rag 
made to do duty for the Geneva gown, 
then hung it up by the neck, crying, 
“Preach, Birkett, preach! The one is 
as good as the other.” She hung the 
poor cat till it died ; but Pepita was an 
Andalusian, with none of that false sen- 
timentality which makes men pitiful to 
beasts. She only laughed as she kicked 
the still quivering body aside, and said 
savagely, “ I wish it had been the man- 


dog instead. A priest with a wife ! Pah ! 
he should be burnt ! ” 

She had thus destroyed all possible 
reverence in her little daughter for the 
faith of the world in which she lived, but 
she had substituted no other of any value. 
She had taught the child to say her Ave 
and Paternoster and to tell her beads, 
to cross herself, to believe in the Holy 
Mother more than in God, and in the 
saints before the Mother. But she had 
taught her to except Saint Sebastian, who 
had once been Pepita’s patron saint and 
favorite, and to call him cheat and rogue 
loudly, so that he should hear. Had he 
not led her to her ruin by the living lie 
of his likeness ? Pepita used to say. Her 
patron saint indeed! What was he about, 
to let Sebastian Dundas befool her as he 
had done ? He was stupid, wicked, of 
no account, so he was deposed with con- 
tumely, and Learn was careful to vilify 
him daily as her mother’s enemy. But 
if he had failed, there were others who 
were good — saints who would restore her 
lost toys, make the sun shine when she 
wanted it to be fine, and work small 
miracles in her favor when properly en- 
treated ; and to these Learn was used to 
pray when she wanted their help. All 
the same, she might rate them roundly 
if they neglected her. 

This was the sum of the child’s re- 
ligious faith and practice. It was not 
much, taken in a vital sense ; but how 
can ignorance give knowledge ? It was 
fetichism of the grossest kind, but what 
else could Pepita formulate, fetich-wor- 
shiper as she was ? 

Here, then, we have her. Learn, as she 
was at fourteen — a mere bit of brute ma- 
terial, potential, not active ; a soul un- 
born ; heart untouched, save by one af- 
fection ; a spirit imprisoned ; an intellect 
unawakened ; a vitalized machine made 
after the pattern of humanity, but as yet 
only a machine ; an elemental chord 
whence would be evolved rich and lovely 
harmonies or strong and jarring discords 
— who could say which ? — volcanic forces 
for the present battened down and with 
thq surface smoothness unrent and un- 
disturbed. For the rest, she was shy and 
taciturn, speaking English with a certain 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM HONDA S. 


37 


hesitancy that rendered her yet more 
silent ; not so strictly beautiful at this 
present time, for she was meagre and 
undeveloped, as promising to become so 
when more fully matured. And then she 
promised to develop a loveliness as su- 
perb as her mother’s, and more refined, 
less animal and more thoughtful, less 
passionate and more intense. 

Silent, impassive, ignorant, her heart 
closed against every one but her mother, 
and held by that mother in almost Ori- 
ental seclusion, no one in North. Aston 
could be said to know Learn Dundas. 
She had never mingled with the other 
children, after the manner of country 
families living side by side ; and on those 
rare occasions when Mr. Dundas, for con- 
tradiction, had insisted on her going to 
their games and fetes, she had sat apart 
silent and motionless, refusing to join in 
their games, not laughing, not speaking, 
not moving — a dark-eyed, melancholy 
little statue, too proud to cry and too shy 
to thaw. The children all dreaded her, 
and she dreaded them. Hence there had 
never been any cordiality between her 
and them ; and, as has been said, no one 
knew her, and she was never seen beyond 
the garden, and rarely within it. 

Madame de Montfort had been two 
months at Lionnet and had not seen 
Learn until to-day. This bright and 
burning day of June, however, Pepita 
and Learn in their lace mantillas, with 
high combs and ribbon rosettes in their 
hair — blood-red for the one, blue and 
white. Our Lady’s colors, for the other 
— and carrying fans as if they were at 
home in Andalusia, came like creatures 
out of a Spanish chorus at the opera and 
presented themselves suddenly at Lion- 
net, where they found Mr. Dundas, as 
his wife expected to find him. 

Hot and cruel as one of her own sandy 
deserts, and jealous as the traditional 
Spaniard should be, Pepita had no idea 
of letting others take pleasure in her re- 
jected property. She would have refused 
her castaway crusts to a starving woman 
if the fancy had so taken her. and she 
carried out the principle with her hus- 
band. She did not trouble herself much 
about the doings of the Misses Harrow- 


by at the Hill, though here too she would 
sometimes descend like a tornado and 
scatter the harmless interests got up by 
the spinsters with their old friend, as 
a storm scatters the treasures of little 
shrines in undefended places. But for 
the most part she despised them too 
much to interfere with them; “white 
mice ’’ she called them with the Spanish 
gesture of contempt when she baptized 
them as nothing worse. Neither was 
she jealous of the Limes’ girls, pretty, 
curly-headed Carry Fairbairn and that 
roguish Susy, both of whom everybody 
liked, and who paid back their popular- 
ity in a general coinage of good-nature 
as heartsome as kissing, and the same to 
every one ; and as to Adelaide Birkett, 
she knew her sentimental spouse too well 
to fear his making any ideal out of her 
straw-colored hair and china-blue eyes. 
But Madame la Marquise de Montfort 
was a woman of another kind : her in- 
fluence was altogether different ; and 
stupid as Pepita was in some things, she 
was clever enough to recognize here her 
mistress and her rival. For which cause 
she set out this sultry sunny day of June 
to pay her long-standing social debt, and 
to make madame over and above a free 
gift of some part of that doubtful thing 
she called her mind. 

Madame was sitting in the drawing- 
room as Mrs. Dundas and Learn came 
in. She was trimming a baby’s frock — 
a safe and sacred kind of employment 
which neutralized the cozy familiarity 
of her companionship. For Mr. Dundas 
was in the conservatory leading out from 
the drawing-room, pottering among the 
flowers as if he were at home. He was 
talking gayly to madame while she pinch- 
ed up bows and he stuck in labels, his 
work to-day having been to write botan- 
ical names on white painted labels, and 
to distribute the same correctly. It gave 
a scientific air to her horticulture, which 
was what madame liked, and it suited 
her to appropriate another person’s know- 
ledge. 

“I am glad to see you, Mrs. Dundas,’’ 
said madame, meeting her guest in her 
usual charming manner — graceful, sweet, 
friendly but not familiar, always with that 


38 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


slight air of well-bred condescension 
which expresses the sense of superiority, 
but refuses to profit by it, characteristic 
of true nobility. 

It was an awkward moment for Mr. 
Dundas, looking so much at home among 
the flower-pots. He had to pretend that 
he was not afraid of his wife, and to con- 
ceal that he was ; also to prevent, if he 
could, the outbreak he felt sure would 
come. But if he was a little unequal to 
the occasion, and could scarcely rise to 
the height of his responsibilities, madame 
was strong enough for all exigencies, and 
without apparent strain. 

Taking no heed of Pepita’s furious 
face when she saw her husband where 
she expected to see him, madame, with 
the placid air, smooth voice and perfect 
self-possession which were her character- 
istics, began to talk to her guest about 
her garden, the flowers she had planted 
and the flowers she was going to plant, 
and how deeply indebted she was to Mr. 
Dundas for his timely visit to-day, when 
she had come to the end of her small 
store of knowledge and he had so kindly 
supplied her with some few names. “ I 
am so passionately fond of flowers,” she 
went on to say in that easy uninterrupted 
flow of talk which was like the run of a 
river, and almost as impossible to check 
when she had a purpose in going on. ‘‘I 
do what I can, you see, here, but at the 
best I have nothing like yours in your 
lovely country,” with a smile that credit- 
ed Mrs. Dundas with all the beauty of 
Spain — flowers, customs, costumes, all. 
“When I lived at the court of Aranjuez, 
in the service of Her Royal Majesty, we 
ladies had a parterre for ourselves, plant- 
ed with the loveliest flowers in the world. 
You know the pomegranate, of course, 
senora, and the oleander ? The parterre 
was full of pomegranates and oleanders, 
with oranges and myrtles, and lots of 
other things I don’t remember. The 
queen used to walk with us there for 
hours in the cool of the evening.” 

Here she stopped, and with the look 
of one lost in retrospective thought pin- 
ned a bow on the baby’s frock. 

‘‘ Were you at our court ? ” asked Pepita 
almost solemnly, her big eyes fixed with 


an odd kind of reverence on this soft- 
voiced ubiquity. 

‘‘It was my second home,” said ma- 
dame gently. 

And there was so much of truth in her 
romance in that she had begun life as a 
nursemaid to an English family living in 
Madrid, and had passed thence to a sim- 
ilar post in the family of a court lady at 
Aranjuez, where she had met her first 
fate. 

‘‘Then you are not a pig of a Protest- 
ant, but a good Catholic like me?” cried 
Pepita, ready to forgive and believe every- 
thing now. 

‘‘I never talk on religious subjects,” 
said madame gravely: ‘‘there is no use 
in it, and it only makes bad blood.” 

‘‘You lived at our court at Aranjuez ?” 
repeated Pepita. 

The very words seemed to soften the 
fibres of her angry heart. Madame, if not 
the rose, had been so near to it as to 
carry about her the sacred perfume. If 
not herself royal, she had consorted with 
royalty, and Spanish royalty — the only 
true thing, the only real blue blood of 
them all ; none of your make-believes, 
like this wretched little court of England, 
buried among the Scottish mountains 
and consorting mainly with gillies and 
gamekeepers ; but home royalty, the 
royalty of the only throne to be called 
a throne in the world. 

Madame smiled, and then she sighed. 
‘‘I met my husband there,” she said: 
‘‘he had Spanish blood in him.” 

‘‘You had not told me that,” said Mr. 
Dundas jealously. He hated Spaniards 
as much as Pepita hated the English, 
and he wished this charming creature 
had not been so far defiled. 

‘‘No,” answered madame quite tran- 
quilly : ‘‘ I have not had an opportunity, 
I suppose. I do not often speak of my- 
self in general society, and I never see 
you alone.” 

‘‘ Can you talk Spanish ? ” asked Pepita 
in patois. 

Madame shook her head. ‘‘I have 
forgotten my Castilian,” she said ; and 
then went off into a vivid description of 
Andalusia, cleverly got up from Murray, 
in which she mentioned by chance — and 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


39 


this was pure chance — the district where 
Pepita had lived. 

It was the crowning stroke of fascina- 
tion. “ Did you see my father’s house ?” 
she cried. 

Madame might keep that worthless 
Sebastian of hers to label her flowers and 
frame water-colors as long as she liked 
now, if only she would talk to her of 
Spain, and tell her about El Corte and 
the bull-fights, and her father’s house 
too. Poor Pepita ! she often lived back 
in the glad old turbulent days of her 
youth, and wondered what had become 
of big brown Jose, of swarthy Juan, of 
fierce Martin, of lithe young daring Pepe. 
How they all loved her ! and she — ah ! 
she would have been happier with any 
one of them, though only muleteers for 
their living and brigands on the off days, 
if it had not been for that false Saint 
Sebastian, who had sent a pretended 
hidalgo to bewilder her with his promises 
and draw her down to evil and misfor- 
tune at this accursed place. 

Madame, watched the splendid face in 
its softening dream. “I dare say I did 
see your father’s house,” she said. ” I 
knew almost all the noblemen and gen- 
tlemen in the place. Which was your 
father’s ?” 

Before Pepita could answer, Mr. Dun- 
das said harshly in Spanish, ‘‘ Hold your 
tongue, woman! Do you want all the 
world to know from what robber’s hovel 
I took you to be an English gentleman’s 
wife?” 

On which Pepita turned round on him 
and presented him with that piece of her 
mind which she had spared Madame de 
Montfort, Learn sitting by. 

Unfortunately for the child, this was 
no unusual experience, and she was nei- 
ther surprised by, nor did'she take part 
in, these animated parental dialogues. 
She only hated her father in her heart 
more and more for the harsh things 
which he said to her mother, while she 
thought that mother’s passion to him the 
most natural and justifiable thing in the 
world. 

Madame, feigning to believe that the' 
dead-white face of the husband as he 
said a few words in a low, hissing voice 


in answer to the torrent poured out by 
the wife, shouting, gesticulating, aflame, 
meant nothing but the friendliest inter- 
course, said, turning to Learn, to whom 
she had not spoken before : ‘‘ I suppose 
you understand Spanish, Miss Dundas ? 
How I envy you 1 I am so sorry I have 
forgotten mine. I really think I must 
take it up again, and then I can join in 
the conversation.” 

Learn made no answer. She did not 
see that one was wanted, and she was 
constitutionally chary of her words. She 
simply raised her large eyes to madame 
and looked at her mournfully, as if some 
unutterable tragedy was connected with 
the fact of speaking Spanish like a na- 
tive ; and then she looked at her mother 
for assistance. 

It was Mr. Dundas, however, who, 
turning that dead-white face of his from 
his wife to madame, answered for his 
daughter. ‘‘It is scarcely worth while 
to give yourself much trouble for that, 
madame,” he said bitterly. ‘‘I do not 
think you would be greatly edified by 
joining in any conversation between 
Mrs. Dundas and myself.” 

‘‘No?” she answered smoothly. ‘‘You 
must allow me to be the best judge of 
that.” 

The visit soon came to an end after 
this. As she rose to go Pepita said, in 
her broken English, ‘‘We must have a 
talk together, senora, you and I, when 
my husband there” (with a contemptu- 
ous jerk of her hand) ‘‘is making fools 
of those white mice Harrowbys. I must 
hear of my beautiful Spain. It will do 
me good. You are the only person I 
have seen since I came to this place of 
perdition who has been there. Pigs ! they 
don’t know the only place worth know- 
ing. And you have seen our queen ! 
Oh yes, we must speak together.” 

‘‘Yes, we will talk of it,” said Ma- 
dame de Montfort quietly, her calm face 
and civil voice contrasting so strangely 
with the fierce excitement of Pepita. ‘‘I 
will gladly tell you all I can remember ; 
and I hope I shall have the pleasure of 
welcoming you here again soon. — Thank 
Heaven, that is over!” she thought as 
Mrs. Dundas and her daughter left the 


40 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


rqom, Pepita calling to her husband in 
Spanish, “Dog of an Englishman! you 
are not wanted, else I would drag you 
out with me by your beard of straw.” — 
“ I would as soon see a wild beast in my 
room as that awful woman. What a 
horror ! what a monster ! And that girl 1 
A mere large-eyed idiot without two ideas 
in her head. She looked as if she was 
imbecile, and I believe she is. Pah!” 

To Mr. Dundas aloud she said sweet- 
ly, “ What a superb face la sehora has, 
and la sehorita too! And the exquisite 
beauty of their dress ! What a mistake 
we English make in our fashions ! How 
far more beautiful the Spanish costume !” 

“ I detest it,” said Mr. Dundas sharply ; 
and madame changed the conversation. 

While going home Pepita was extra- 
ordinarily excited. She spoke in a loud, 
strident voice that made the laborers in 
the fields and the passing carters look at 
her curiously. They had never got quite 
used to her heathenish headgear, and 
thought her mad without a doubt. To- 
day they thought her madder than ever ; 
and the haymakers and the weeders 
looked one to the other as “Madam 
Dundas,” as they called her, drove by, 
and some said compassionately, “Mr. 
Dundas, he be main holden with such a 
missis ;” while others, sterner in their 
perception of retributive justice, answer- 
ed back, “ He be well served. What call 
had he to tie hisself up to a heathen like 
that there ?” 

“Leama,” cried Pepita in Spanish — 
mother and daughter never talked to- 
gether in any other language — “I hate 
that woman, but she masters me when 
I am with her. You must hate her too, 
little Leama, and not let her master you.” 

“I do if you do, mamma,” answered 
Learn. 

“But I was glad to hear of the old 
home,” continued Pepita. “Ah! little 
one, when you are old enough to have 
money of your own, we will go to my 
beloved Andalusia, and live there to- 
gether under the grapes and the olives 
with the saints and good Christians. We 
will leave this accursed .place and that 
brigand, your father, and we will go 
where men know how to live and love.” 


“Yes, mamma, I should like that too,’* 
said Learn. 

“ Yes, you would like it, little one. The 
dances to the snapping castanets, and the 
bull -fights! Holy Virgin! it is fine to 
see the men and bulls — good bulls, brave 
bulls, with their man apiece killed and 
the horses made into mincemeat! You 
must like that, little Leama, else you are 
no true daughter of Andalusia, no child 
of Spain. It will be fine to see you at 
your first. It is better than the first 
communion, and something like it. A 
little pale and holding light to my dress 
because you are only a young thing and 
not accustomed, and then your heart 
beating as if your lover was under your 
window. Would that we were there, 
away from this English hole of mud 
and that traitor, your father ! Tell me, 
Leama, that you love rne, little one^ and 
hate him as much as I do.” 

“ I love you, mamma, and only you, 
and what you hate I hate,” answered 
Learn, her eyes kindling. “I am an An- 
dalusian too.” 

“ Good child ! good Leama ! never for- 
get that. Hate goes farther than love. 
All good Spaniards know how to hate. 
Only fools love,” said Pepita scornfully. 

“Except you to me and me to you, 
mamma,” said Learn, taking her hand 
and kissing it — that small, fat, dimpled 
hand with the taper fingers and pink 
nails, one of the most beautiful things in 
the world to Learn. 

“Yes, yes! that Is different. Mothers 
and daughters love each other. Holy 
Virgin ! who should, if they do not ? 
But that is another matter.” 

“And some fathers and daughters too, 
mamma?” said Learn interrogatively. 

Her mother gave an angry scream 
that startled the sheep in the fields and 
the birds in the bushes. “ No, no ! not 
fathers and daughters !” she cried, cross- 
ing herself against the evil omen of such 
a thought. “ My father beat me, and I 
hated him as much as I hate yours. No; 
fathers and husbands are tyrants : only 
mothers and lovers are good. Husbands 
are wretches. If I had a good Andalu- 
sianBy me now, mine should learn some- 
thing of the things of Spain he little 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


41 


dreams of. When you have lovers, little 
Leama, I will tell you all, and how you 
are to manage. You must lead them a 
dance through the wood, and leave them 
there. Never let yourself love, but hold 
them at your feet. When they come I 
will teach you, but if you let yourself 
love, I will kill you.” 

“I shall never love, mamma,” said 
Learn shuddering. ” I am afraid of men. 
I will never leave you. You are different 
from any one else to me. It is another 
world to be with you.” 

” Because I have the sun in my blood,” 
said Pepita, striking her hand on her 
arms. ” I am not like these washed-out 
rags, these damp hens of Englishwomen. 
Nor are you, my little Leama ! The 
saints be praised, you have your moth- 
er’s eyes and your mother’s heart. I 
could make you kill if I wanted you to 
kill ; and some day I shall.” 

Learn was silent — not because she was 
shocked at her mother’s words, but be- 
cause she was frightened at her manner. 
She was always afraid to see her so ex- 
cited as she was to-day. It made her 
look so strange, with her nostrils so red 
and distended and her eyes with that 
burning light behind them. And as oft- 
en as not these furious moods ended in 
some fierce outbreak against Learn her- 
self, whom her mother would beat into 
cruel bruises. Once she made her teeth 
meet in the child’s lean brown arm. She 
carried the mark yet, and would always. 

To-day, however, nothing of this hap- 
pened, but for all the evening Pepita was 
restless and excited, repeating to herself, 
‘‘A friend of my queen, at my court, in 
my country !” adding once, ‘‘ I ought to 
love her for this ; but she conquers me 
when I am with her, and I hate her when 
I am away from her.” 

Meanwhile, Mr. Dundas, still sitting 
with madame, expressed his interest in 
her travels and his wish to know all about 
her courtly residence in Spain. 

” Willingly,” she answered, and began, 
in the most natural way in the world, 
something about the queen and Aran- 
juez, Madrid and the Escurial ; but be- 
fore Mr. Dundas had fairly seized the 
meaning of what she said — for it was all 


put rather hazily — she had glided off into 
another track, and Spain was left behind 
like a dissolving view. 

After this madame studied the map 
and the handbook yet more diligently, 
and made herself mistress of sundry de- 
tails that carried weight. But she pro- 
nounced the words oddly for one who 
had lived at court, and spoke of Saint 
Jago and Don Quixote de la Mancha as 
if these were English names, and the 
letters cornposing them had the same 
sound and value in Castilian as they 
have in good Cockney English. 


CHAPTER VIII. 

ONLY FRANK. 

“Madame,” cried Josephine, rushing 
into Madame de Montfort’s early one 
afternoon in a state of brilliant excite- 
ment, “ we have such good news from my 
brother !” 

“Yes?” said madame, turning from 
white to red and then to white again, her 
face disturbed as Josephine' had never 
seen it disturbed before. “You startled 
me,” she added with a forced smile by 
way of explanation. 

“ I am so sorry, but I wanted to tell 
you : my brother is coming home,” Jo- 
sephine exclaimed, not connecting her 
friend’s embarrassment with herself or 
her news. 

Madame put her hand to her side. “ In- 
deed !” she said faintly. “From India?” 

“No, not Edgar: it is Frank who is 
coming down from London. He is com- 
ing next week : is not that delightful ?” 
answered Josephine, still radiant and 
excited. “ I wish it had been my darling 
Edgar,” more soberly. 

“Oh!” said madame drav/ing a deep 
breath, relieved, yet disappointed. “ Only 
Frank !” 

Josephine looked puzzled. “Yes, only 
Frank,” she repeated. “ But why ‘ only,’ 
dear madame ? Edgar is the eldest and 
my favorite, but Frank is Frank all the 
same, and a dear boy — such a nice fel- 
low when you get to know him and don’t 
mind his little affectations.” 

She laughed pleasantly. Even his 


42 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


“ little affectations ” were not real blem- 
ishes to her affectionate eyes. 

“Yes,” said madame, who had recov- 
ered herself by now : “as you say, Frank 
is Frank, but he is in London, which is 
next door as it were, and could come 
down at any hour, while your brother 
Edgar is so far away that his return home 
would be a family jubilee indeed. More 
than a family jubilee,” she added with 
her sweet graciousness of manner, in- 
cluding herself and all the world in the 
Hill future of rejoicing. 

“Still, wanting Edgar, Frank is delight- 
ful,” said Josephine, sticking to her point. 

“Surely! so tell us all about it,” an- 
swered madame, drawing a low chair 
close to her own for her guest, and mak- 
ing up her face to a listening receptive 
expression. 

It was not the first time that Josephine 
had amused her new friend and made 
talk between them by telling her of these 
two brothers of hers whom she so frankly 
idolized. If she liked going to Lionnet 
for her own purposes, madame liked as 
much to have her. She was never tired 
of hearing all about “the boys,” as Jo- 
sephine called them ; which showed what 
a sweet and comprehensive character she 
had, and how she was able to take that 
true sisterly interest in her friends’ loves 
and feelings, even when quite apart from 
her own life, which is so sadly wanting 
in the mass of mankind. 

She had heard all about Edgar by now 
— where he was, what he thought of doing, 
when he was expected home, and the 
like. She could never get to the bottom 
of the mystery why he had gone away 
so suddenly, when his place was man- 
ifestly at home after his father’s death ; 
but once, when Josephine had exhausted 
her small stock of conjectures, madame 
had looked up meekly from the baby on 
her lap, and had said in a questioning 
voice, as her contribution to the possi- 
bilities of the case, “Do you think he 
had any attachment in London when he 
spent the winter there, as you say, a year 
and a half ago ? He might have fallen 
in love and got into trouble somehow, 
perhaps been refused ; perhaps — but that 
does not seem very likely — been jilted ?” 


To which Josephine had answered 
earnestly, “ Oh, I am sure there was noth- 
ing of the kind. We should have heard 
of it if there had been. Frank would 
have heard of it : he knew all Edgar’s 
life, and he would have told us. No, I 
am sure there was no love-affair.” 

“That is conclusive, and shuts my 
poor little avenue at once,” then had 
said madame with her placid smile. 
“But it only makes the mystery still 
more mysterious.” 

“And yet, if there had been a love- 
affair, and we had never heard of it, 
what a dreadful thing that would have 
been 1” innocent Josephine had cried ; 
and madame had closed the conversa- 
tion by saying demurely, “Yes, dreadful 
indeed 1” 

“And when is your brother Frank, as 
you call him, coming down ?” asked ma- 
dame, going back to the initial circum- 
stance of the conversation, after they had 
described Edgar and his present position 
and future prospects, his temper and his 
habits, when he was likely to return, and 
whomdie was likely to marry, Josephine, 
with feminine treachery, on the point of 
saying to this last clause, “ I know who 
would like to marry him — Adelaide Bir- 
kett,” but refraining for the present mo- 
ment, though she knew in her own heart 
it would come out some day. 

“Next Monday,” answered Josephine. 

“Will he stay long ?” madame inquired. 

“We hope so; very likely he will be 
here for a month or six weeks.” 

Madame was silent a few minutes. 
“And how do you propose to amuse 
him?” she then said, keeping her eyes 
down. “Gentlemen need so much 
amusing.” 

“ By a thousand pleasant ways,” laugh- 
ed the girl. “We will have a picnic to 
Dunaston Castle, and some girls to stay 
with us, and croquet parties, and,” affec- 
tionately, “bring him to see you.” 

“Perhaps that would not amuse him,” 
said madame. “It might be a nuisance 
instead.” 

But Josephine cried warmly, “ No, no, 
no ! it will be a delight : how can vou 
doubt it?” 

And as a further testimony to her as- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


43 


surance she got up and kissed the smooth, 
fair face, that had the most invincible dis- 
like to be kissed. A sallow complexion 
stippled up to harmonize with dark hair, 
artificially bleached and bronzed, has 
naturally this invincible dislike to be 
kissed. ' 

But madame was obliged to submit 
every now and then to the girl’s embar- 
rassing affectionateness, trusting to have 
time to repair the damaged tract before 
other callers should arrive. Being of the 
kind which balances all things in this 
life as so much to the good and so much 
to the bad, keeping a debtor and cred- 
itor account with annoyance and advan- 
tage, she took these unwelcome caresses 
as the tax she had to pay for the friend- 
ship of a Harrowby girl ; which certainly 
counted for something to her good in the 
place. 

Time went on, and the days and nights 
flowed silently together. The family at 
the Hill were pleasantly excited, and 
Carry Fairbairn was prettier than ever, 
because happier and more heartsome 
than ever. Madame was troubled, and 
yet she did the best to give herself cour- 
age, often saying to herself, “ I have seen 
him only once, and then my hair was 
dark. He cannot recognize me as I am.” 

Still, the trouble continued, and the 
courage was at the most an attempt. So 
things went until the day when Frank 
arrived — Frank, the handsome, vain, 
affected young barrister, who thought 
his success in life depended more on his 
person and his manners than' on his law 
and industry, coming down to his coun- 
try relations as an act of condescension 
for which he expected to be paid, part 
in flattery and attention, part in a hand- 
some cheque from his mother added to 
his allowance. 

In London, to be sure, he made as 
much account of ‘‘his place” as if it had 
been Knole or Stoneleigh at the least, 
and exalted this country household of 
fairly, good middle - class position into 
more than aristocratic value, placing it 
on the very apex of the county families. 
When he came down from London he 
gave himself the airs of court life stoop- 
ing to rustication, and made his people 


almost believe that the metropolis was 
at his feet and that royalty itself went 
out of its way to do him honor. It was 
a way he had ; but his heart was better 
than his head, and if he passed for a sort 
of social Adonis, he was really an honest 
gentleman underneath his disguise. 

This annual visit of Frank’s was the 
great event of the Flarrowby year. The 
mother and sisters kept all their planned 
excursions, all invitations to pretty girl- 
guests, all extra festivities, until Frank 
should come down. And to do the 
handsome young fellow justice, he also 
did his best to make things go off brisk- 
ly, and exerted himself to give an extra 
fillip to the usually rather heavy routine 
of the home junketings. 

This time things went marvelously 
well. The weather was fine : there were 
two or three charming girls at the Hill 
and two or three pleasant men at the 
Limes. One day they made a picnic to 
Dunaston Castle ; another time they un- 
dertook a three days’ riding expedition 
to Grey Knowes, a famous place some 
forty miles away ; Carry Fairbairn and 
Adelaide Birkett, both pretty girls, were 
constantly at the Hill, and Frank had 
never yet found himself overwhelmed 
with petticoats ; but the new arrival, this 
Madame la Marquise de Montfort, whom 
the smart young barrister specially wish- 
ed to see, had from a variety of causes 
been as yet invisible, and Frank’s curi- 
osity had increased in ratio with his dis- 
appointments. 

Mrs. Harrowby, too, on her side, spe- 
cially wished him to *ee her. She want- 
ed him to propound from the heights of 
his London experience who she was and 
what she was, and more than once said 
she would feel quite satisfied with her 
clever son’s opinion. If he endorsed 
this new-comer, then she felt sure they 
were safe ; but if he pronounced against 
her — well, if he pronounced against her, 
what could she do ? Unless she wished 
to make a division in the society, she 
must do just what she was doing now — 
countenance while she distrusted, and 
recognize under protest. 

Nothing amused Frank more than to 
hear his mother discuss her perplexities ; 


44 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


wherein he never helped her. To tease 
her he used to say with his most candid 
air that it was so unlikely an adventuress, 
or even a person of doubtful antecedents, 
should come to North Aston, where there 
were no old gentlemen to gull and no 
young ones to victimize, he was prepared 
to find madame all she had represented 
herself to be — a sorrowing widow whose 
means had diminished, burying herself 
in the country for mingled grief and 
economy, and casting anchor at North 
Aston emphatically by a fluke. But this 
was only for the sake of contradiction 
and argument. Having had a tolerably 
varied experience in London, and being, 
moreover, judicially minded on his own 
account, he secretly believed that Ma- 
dame la Marquise de Montfort would 
turn out no better than she should be, 
and that all these dear stupid folks of 
his were simply more or less taken in 
by an adventuress. 

Still, he could not decide on the mat- 
ter, for madame had become strangely 
invisible of late. Frank Harrowby’s ar- 
rival had sent her to the upper chambers 
whence she could command a view of 
the road, and she rivaled Mrs. Dundas 
in the cool audacity with which she 
denied herself while seated concealed 
behind the curtains. She had been dil- 
igent in returning the Harrowby call 
when she had seen Frank safely on the 
moorland road and knew that he could 
not return for another hour or two, and 
she had been sweetly distressed at the 
misfortune of his perpetual absence — also 
of her own — for her dear friend Josephine 
talked so often of her brothers, she had 
said with a smile, she seemed almost to 
know them in one way, and she was 
really anxious to know them in another. 
It was so unfortunate, too, that when the 
rector gave his dinner-party on Frank’s 
arrival, aaid she was asked and had ac- 
cepted, she had such a wretched head- 
ache she could not possibly go down. 

But the lady of the Hill had set her 
mind on this meeting, and for once ma- 
dame had to acknowledge her master. 
She could not help herself : she must go 
to the Harrowby dinner got up for Frank 
next week. If she had continual head- 


aches just at this moment, it would look 
suspicious ; and she must avoid suspicion 
as carefully as — detection. Had she been 
in London with a friendly doctor at her 
elbow, she would probably have had a 
rather severe attack of measles, but here 
she was unable to be shunted on such a 
plea; and accordingly, when Mrs. Har- 
rowby’s not^ arrived requesting the favor, 
Madame la Marquise was forced to reply, 
accepting with pleasure, and forced also 
to go when the day came. 

She was desperately disturbed — it 
might almost be called terrified — at the 
thought of this meeting; but when the 
time came she took her courage in her 
two hands as usual, and threw herself 
on the good luck which had befriended 
her so generously until now. She was 
very pale when she entered the drawing- 
room, where the whole of the guests had 
assembled. She had come rather late 
purposely. As she had to run the risk, 
the woman’s vanity in her made her de- 
sire to run it with the greatest amount of 
glory; and she knew that she came into 
a room gracefully and looked well when 
in movement. 

The faces which met her as she en- 
tered appeared like a very sea. Her 
nervousness had multiplying powers of 
painful extent, and the fourteen people 
who turned and looked at this late-com- 
ing sinner, for whom they were all wait- 
ing and all hungry, seemed to her at the 
least fifty. But out from the crowd she 
singled at a glance Frank, standing su- 
perbly at the fireplace watching her en- 
trance. Her heart stood still. How like 
he was his elder brother ! and yet slight- 
er, darker, brighter. Edgar was the 
handsomer man of the two, a bigger- 
built man, and with a head and face 
expressive of more thought, and may- 
be self-will. Frank was keener, lither, 
more mobile, more pretentious : he af- 
fected more the airs of a man of fashion 
and the bearing of a man of the (Lon- 
don) world. If Edgar affected anything, 
it was rather the bearing of the typical 
Englishman, despotic and high-handed, 
knowing better than anyone else every- 
thing under heaven — absolutely right, 
despising superstition, but down before 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


45 


conventionalism, and, though contemptu- 
ous of the mind and purposes of women, 
to be managed by the first clever hussy 
who chose to lay her finger-tips on his. 

After interchanging greetings with 
those whom she knew, madame, as 
white as the lappets of her widow’s cap, 
turning her head in obedience to the 
voice of her hostess, set herself steadily 
to her ordeal, raised her eyes and looked 
full into Frank’s face as he bowed and 
she swept herself and her garments into 
a graceful curve at the formal introduc- 
tion which made them acquainted — for 
the second time. He looked at her nar- 
rowly, with a puzzled expression in his 
face; while she, every nerve strung to 
the utmost, met his eyes with as much of 
the frank indifference of ignorance as she 
could assume, but her lips were tightly 
closed, and the hand which held her fan 
grasped it like a band of steel. No one, 
not even Frank, saw this : that smooth 
outside of hers hid so much and was so 
thickly laid. Dinner was announced al- 
most immediately after this ; and Frank, 
giving madame his arm, led her out as 
the first lady, an odd kind of doubt run- 
ning very distinctly through his mind as 
to whether she was entitled to this place 
or not, and if he was not dishonoring by 
implication the ladies of known safety 
and respectability thus assigned to walk 
in her train. 

All through that dinner Frank looked 
and pondered, haunted with a likeness 
that escaped him jhst as he wished to 
verify it, feeling sure that he had seen 
her before ; but where ? when ? how ? 
When he asked himself these questions 
his memory answered nothing and the 
past was a blank. She, equal to her 
dangers — as indeed was she not always ? 
— talked to her companion in her smooth, 
pleasant way, but so vaguely as to facts, 
opinions, people, that Frank felt her con- 
versation to be like her past personality, 
a kind of impalpable cloud wherein noth- 
ing was defined and nothing sure. She 
was exceedingly careful during this talk, 
committed herself to nothing, mentioned 
no names, but referred only to general- 
izations as “friends of mine,’’ evidently 
persons of wealth and standing, but not 


tabulated, until she cast anchor on the 
Spanish queen, surely a safe harborage 
with any North Astonian. She spoke of 
her with her usual glib facility, with the 
respectful familiarity of an intimate ; and 
to clinch her position went into the plot 
— which was really a plot some years ago 
— when the queen was to have been taken 
in her box at the opera and carried out 
of the country, and was saved from her 
fate by the intervention of an English- 
man. Madame gave the details fairly 
enough : she only changed the person- 
ality, and made herself the intervening 
power. But Frank, who was an accurate 
present-day historian and knew all about 
the plot in question, looked into her face 
and said in a surprised tone, “How ex- 
traordinary ! One never does know the 
rights of things. I thought it had been 
an Englishman who had warned the 
queen.’’ 

“So it was,’’ answered madame with 
calm composure. “But it was me who 
warned him.’’ 

“An unrecorded heroine of unwritten 
history?’’ he laughed, and she slightly 
flushed. 

“Oh,’’ she said with her noble air, “I 
do not care to be spbken about. It is 
enough to do the good, not to have it 
made public.” 

“As you have been to Spain, of course 
you speak Spanish ?’’ then said Frank, 
who knew about half a dozen words. 

“ I have forgotten all my Spanish,’’ she 
answered with a pretty little laugh. “ So 
stupid of me, is it not ? It is from want 
of practice. I must get it up again — 
really I must.” 

“Madame speaks French?” then 
probed that merciless social surgeon in 
pure Parisian, the same to him as his 
mother-tongue. 

Madame smiled in a kind of depreca- 
ting way as she shook her head,,answer- 
ing, with playful reproach, “ Fie ! who 
does such a rude thing as to speak a for- 
eign language at table ?” 

if was the best fence she could have 
made in the circumstances, but it betray- 
ed her all the same. 

Frank smiled and turned his bright 
eyes on her keenly. She smiled back 


46 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


an answer suavely, tranquilly, though 
her heart had sunk like lead. 

“ Don’t you agree with me ?” she asked. 

“I accept the rebuke,” he answered 
with mock humility : ‘‘ premising, how- 
ever, that your indignation is undeserved, 
as there is no one here who cannot speak 
French fluently : therefore you may, if 
you like, begin the conversation in that 
tongue and we will all follow you.” 

” It is very charming to find such fa- 
cility,” answered madame graciously. 
” It reminds me of my friend Madame 
Espartero. She was the most accom- 
plished woman for languages I ever 
knew ; so too was my queen Isabella.” 

“Indeed?” said Frank. “I thought 
Her Most Catholic Majesty had been an 
intensely ignorant woman.” 

“Not at all,” said madame. “Ask 
Mrs. Dundas.” 

“One savage of another?” returned 
Frank. “Xantippe of Messalina?” 

Madame smiled. The waters were 
very deep about her, and she wished fer- 
vently she were on dry land, safe with 
those who loved her, did not care to 
probe, and who accepted her quand 
mhne, hazy literature and catholic ex- 
perience, slips of grammar and incon- 
trovertible assertions of persons, all with 
the same unquestioning faith. Never- 
theless, as it would not do to show that 
she was either afraid or distanced, she 
said quietly, “ Do you like Mrs. Dundas ?” 
and looked at her across the table, 

“ Who can like Xantippe ?” said Frank 
with a shrug. 

“ Is that her name ?” asked madame. 

But she spoke in so matter-of-fact a 
manner that Frank was left uncertain 
whether it was covert satire or crass igno- 
rance, and merely laughed back his reply, 
by which she gained breathing-time and 
drove the conversation on to familiar 
ground— the Park in the season and 
last year’s Royal Academy. She had 
remembered some of the leading pic- 
tures well ; but for a woman who was 
herself a sufficiently good artist to liave 
painted those water-colors which Mr. 
Dundas had helped to mount and frame, 
she showed herself wonderfully ignorant 
of some popular technicalities. She made 


some odd blunders, too, that were re- 
markable. In speaking of a picture of 
“ Hercules and Omphale,” she ran the 
former word into two syllables, and the 
latter she pronounced as if it was Umfle ; 
she made a wild shot about Columbus, 
and spoke of him as an Englishman, 
which was queer, taking into account 
both her American and Spanish experi- 
ences ; and she confounded Mary Tudor 
and Mary Stuart in a manner that was, 
to say the least of it, singular in a per- 
son of her station and presumed edu- 
cation. Frank caught her blunders and 
led her on. He got her to pity beautiful 
Mary Stuart for Philip’s ill behavior, and 
then for his death ; to condemn her treat- 
ment of her younger sister, Elizabeth, 
and to be not at all astonished that the 
queen should avenge the princess and 
cut off her head, with Calais engraven on 
her heart. In a word, he gauged her, and 
he found the measure shallow enough. 
And all the time poor madame was 
vaguely conscious that things were going 
wrong, though she made heroic efforts to 
right them, and if she showed her igno- 
rance, showed also her cleverness. 

She left on Frank a composite kind 
of feeling. He distrusted her, and yet 
he admired her. He felt as if he had 
seen her before, but her true personality 
evaded him. She was not an educated 
woman, but her manners were graceful 
and her habits those of one accustomed 
to refined society. She had a subtle 
tinge of something worse than Bohe- 
mianism in her appearance, but nothing 
could be more modest than her looks 
and conversation. She was evidently 
guarding a secret while she seemed to 
be most candid ; and when she was ap- 
parently on the point of giving a clue 
the end broke and the thread was lost. 
She was a mystery — of that he was cer- 
tain — whether an evil mystery or one 
only unfortunate he had no means to 
discover ; still, she was a mystery, and 
that was more than North Aston wanted. 

“Well, Frank, what of Madame de 
Montfort ?” asked the mother when the 
evening was over and the family had col- 
lected together to discuss how it had gone 
and the like. “Who is she, my dear?” 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


47 


“That is hard to say,” Frank answer- 
ed. “Who she is not is pretty evident : 
she is not an educated woman, though 
she is in some things a lady. It seems 
to me that I have seen her somewhere, 
but I cannot tell where, and I don’t 
wholly like her looks. There is some- 
thing louche about her, and I would have 
you all take care of her.” 

“Oh,” said Josephine, “and she is so 
nice !’’ 

“ So is the vampire-bat, my dear, when 
it fans you to sleep and sucks your great 
toe,” replied Frank. “ Mind, I don’t say 
she is bad, and she may be the widow 
of the Marquis de Montfort, for anything 
I know : that is a fact easily verified. 
But, widow or no widow, she is queer ; 
and if I can read faces she is both false 
and artificial.’’ 

“ I cannot think why you should say 
so, and on only once seeing her,’’ re- 
monstrated Josephine. 

“ But if Frank does say so, he is likely 
to be correct, with his experience,’’ said 
Fanny. 

“And it is just what we and mamma 
have always told you, Josephine ; but you 
are so infatuated about this woman !’’ 
said Maria. 

“ Then why do you ask her to the house 
if you think her so bad?’’ urgfed Jose- 
phine, almost in tears. 

Whereat her sisters rebuked her for 
impertinence, as their manner was. 

“No,’’ said Frank, drawing her to him 


kindly ; “she is only logical without know- 
ing it. If we did the absolutely right thing, 
we should decline to receive her here 
without credentials ; but,’’ shrugging his 
handsome shoulders, “who of us does 
the absolutely right thing? And one 
may be too hard on the poor sinner — if 
sinner she is — as I should say she was by 
her looks.’’ 

Whence it may be seen that Frank did 
not add much to the enlightenment of 
his mother’s perplexities, and that he left 
the question pretty much where he found 
it. Nevertheless, though he never com- 
mitted himself to an opinion as to who 
madame really was, he stood stoutly to 
his major proposition that she was queer, 
also that he doubted and distrusted her ; 
and he always ended by vaguely coun- 
seling his people to be wary of her and 
careful not to get entangled with her too 
deeply. This done, he would go off to 
Lionnet and do a little bit of delving on 
his own account. But Madame de Mont- 
fort was as clever as he ; and he merely 
lost his time when he attempted to dig 
out from the secret recesses of the fair 
stranger’s past any information she had 
made up her mind to withhold. 

“Which proves she has something to 
conceal,’’ said Frank, lawyer though he 
was uni-^jiindful of the legal maxims which 
rule that no man is bound to criminate 
himself, and that all accused are to be 
held innocent till proved guilty. 

• 




XXX. 


CHAPTER IX. 

LAS COSAS DE ESPARA. 

I T would have been strange if Frank’s 
opinion of Madame de Montfort had 
been anything but unfavorable. He was 
too young yet not to wish to air his su- 
perior knowledge when he could, and too 
vain not to like to show himself wiser 
than the world which in early days had 
held him in subjection. He was one of 
those young infallibles who despise things 
ancient simply because they are ancient, 
and who think the human nature that 
has arisen since they came to their ma- 
jority a different kind of thing from what 
it was thirty years ago. When they go 
down to the old place to save money 
and enjoy themselves, they go down as 
reformers and iconoclasts, finding every- 
thing in use there, material and mental, 
exploded and behind the age, and set- 
ting themselves to the task of indoctri- 
nating the stupid natives with new views 
of life and new adjustments everywhere. 
According to them, every one is in the 
dark till they appear. When they do ap- 
pear they generally throw the whole place 
into confusion, and end by evolving mod- 
ern discords out of antique harmonies. 

Given a stranger without vouchers, re- 
ceived by the unsuspecting Ngrth Aston- 
ians as one of themselves, and it would 
have been impossible for Frank not to 
have condemned. She might have been 
a Saint Dorothea in momentary eclipse, 
or a Queen Berengaria with her crown 
hidden for the day : all the same, the 
young barrister would have shaken h?s 
curly head like a second Lord Burleigh, 
and would have pronounced her through 
his eyeglass as no better than she should 
be. When it came to a golden-headed, 
handsome-faced woman of great clever- 
ness and small information, who made 
bad shots about Columbus, and did not 
know the difference between the Stuart 
Mary and the Tudor — a lady who had 
lived at the Spanish court, where she had 

48 


been on terms of intimacy with the queen, 
and yet could not speak Spanish, nor yet 
French — then Frank was perhaps justi- 
fied in his suspicion that all was not as it 
appeared, and that the things pertaining 
to madame would not bear close exam- 
ination. But there was no denying that 
as time went on, and the marquise baf- 
fled him more and more completely, he 
became unnecessarily bitter and made 
the most of his case. 

Yet, as poor Josephine used to say, half 
tearfully, half petulantly, “What good 
did it do to speak against madame as he 
did ? He said over and over again that 
he could not advise them to cut her. She 
had been admitted, and now they could 
not discard her without cause. Why, 
then, need he make them all uncomfort- 
able about her, and put things into their 
heads they would never have thought of 
but for him ? It seemed to her so wrong, 
in one way or another! She felt that it 
was treacherous to visit madame one day 
and vilify her the next, and she thought 
it would be far better to say nothing at 
all, or to act on their words.” By which 
Josephine proved herself undoubtedly 
the honestest and most reasonable of the 
whole Hill household. 

But as she was without home influence, 
being the youngest daughter, and of a 
credulous, affectionate kind of nature, 
which laid her open to ridicule, her re- 
monstrances went for nothing. They 
might be true, but, true or not, they were 
“only what Josephine says,” and carried 
no more weight than what the birds sang 
on the housetops. 

In one thing, however, she gained her 
point — namely, that they should tell no 
one in the place how Frank suspected 
madame of unknown evil and counseled 
vague distrust ; and she pleaded for this 
so earnestly and with so much pathos 
and sincerity that she induced them all 
to promise ; and the Harrowby word was 
as good as most people’s bonds. 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


49 


' But Adelaide Birkett found it out from 
' Josephine herself. Weak, good-natured, 
I plastic Joseph, as her friends called her, 
had no hard places which the rector’s 
I clever daughter could not knead, no 
! closed doors which she could not open. 

She learnt the whole thing three days 
i ^ after the dinner-party, and under the 
strictest vows of secresy. Whether she 
would keep her vows of secresy depend- 
j ed on those monsters of mystery, unfore- 
seen circumstances. If it suited her pur- 
pose, she would not tell that young Frank 
' Harrowby knew Madame de Montfort to 
be an ignorant adventuress, for that is 
how she would have put it : if it did not, 

■ she would proclaim it. Adelaide was 
not hampered by the inconvenient im- 
pediment of ultra honor, and thought all 
things fair in war if she might have de- 
murred to a few in love. 

Never a very responsible kind of per- 
son, Pepita seemed to be fast losing the 
j little self-control she had ever had ; and 
the odd fascination which madame had 
for her, as for others, might have almost 
excused the Spaniard’s belief that it was 
witchcraft and unholy. At home to Learn, 
and when free from the restraining pow- 
er of her presence, she found no words 
too strong to say of her, no abuse too 
bad, no superstitious terror too intense 
at the power she had over her ; but by 
some subtle magnetism, certainly not vol- 
untarily exerted by madame, she was 
drawn almost daily to Lionnet, where 
she did no good for herself, and was a 
nuisance to all concerned. She got no 
substantial talk about Spain or the Span- 
iards, which was what she went for — the 
illusory bait that was always dangling 
before her eyes and never caught — and 
she interrupted the easy flow of ma- 
dame’s suave enchantment over her 
landlord and cut short the rector’s spir- 
itual exhortations. 

Mr. Dundas found his charming oc- 
cupation of handyman about the place 
gone without recall when his wife was 
by, watching him with those jealous eyes 
of hers, which saw all they were not 
wanted to see, and imagined more than 
they saw ; the rector’s lessons of good 
counsel, composed and delivered for the 
4 


special benefit of his ewe-lamb, fell flat 
and without application when shared 
with the woman who held he should be 
burnt, and with a child who only stared 
and did not speak ; while as for soft- 
hearted Josephine — who still, in spite of 
wiser home advice, was oftener at Lion- 
net than she should have been — she was 
frightened from her holding by the ad- 
vent of a woman who every now and 
then swooped down on her as on the 
rest, and told her coarsely that although 
she was only a white mouse, with a ges- 
ture of contempt, she should not make 
eyes like that at her husband. 

But the Spaniard neither saw nor 
cared for the small social earthquake 
she brought in her pocket, save indeed 
that she had always a savage kind of 
pleasure in insulting Birkett, as she call- 
ed him, and annoying Josephine and 
Dundas; so she went again and again 
to beseech madame to talk to her of 
Spain, of El Corte, the bull-fights and 
the gracious majesty under whose august 
shadow she had lived ; of Andalusia and 
her father’s house ; of the saints and the 
priests who were priests — to talk to her 
of the only country where the sun shone, 
and which said its prayers as prayers 
should be said — the only country where 
life was life, and men and women lived, 
as Christians, and not as pigs and 
heathens. 

“Talk to me of Spain,’’ was Pepita’s 
one standing passionate prayer — “my 
glorious Spain, where I was so happy, 
and which I was such a fool to leave.’’ 

To which madame invariably made 
answer in her smooth way, “Willingly, 
senora,’’ but by some inexplicable me- 
chanism of conversation as invariably 
glided off into another topic, leaving her 
fiery guest with the feeling of a thirsty 
Tantalus, seeing the fresh waters close 
to him, but unable to drink of them — 
mocked by promises kept to the ear and 
broken to the hope. 

All this time Mrs. Dundas lived in an 
ever-increasing fever. The turbulent 
nostalgia, mingled with hate and jeal- 
ousy and restless vague desire, that pos- 
sessed her, broke up the somnolent in- 
dolence of her daily habits. Never able 


50 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


to occupy herself, now that the daylight 
sleep which had kept her quiet for at 
least eight hours out of the conventional 
sixteen had gone, she had only people 
on whom to fall back, and of these peo- 
ple only Madame la Marquise de Mont- 
fort pleased her. 

The North Aston community might 
well say to each other, “Good Heavens! 
the infliction that woman would have been 
had she been social and energetic !’’ 

Poor Madame de Montfort 1 Her cor- 
vee at this time was heavy. It took all 
her strong powers of self-control to re- 
tain the sweetness and placidity of de- 
meanor proper to the role she had cast 
for herself in the drama she had in- 
augurated at North Aston. But she wise- 
ly reflected that whoso permits another 
to disturb him is so far that other’s crea- 
ture, and the weaker of the two ; and as 
she prided herself on her absolute su- 
premacy over weakness, prejudice, man- 
kind and herself, she would not allow 
even Pepita’s daily presence to ruffle her 
smooth plumage. She never suffered 
herself to show the Spaniard how in- 
tensely her questions bored her — still 
less, how they taxed her wits to evade 
while seeming to meet them frankly and 
to answer them with candor. For ma- 
dame’s facts were curious things in their 
way, and scarcely able to bear close scru- 
tiny. Not the cleverest synchronizer of 
the century could have made her dates 
agree ; and not the acutest historic ge- 
nius, diligent in his search after the ruling 
law, could have deprived her stories of 
their phenomenal character. It was well 
for her that the North Astonians were 
neither chronologists nor critics, and that 
she shot her arrows into space where they 
hit no man’s target when she described 
the places she had never seen, told of 
the things that had never happened, and 
spoke of her dear friends the queens 
and princesses whom she knew only as 
a street-gazer by sight. 

Learn was always with her mother on 
these visits of infliction. Indeed, Pepita 
was too jealous to allow the child to be 
out of her presence by night or by day ; 
and the real reason why Learn was so 
ignorant was because no governess would 


or could remain at Andalusia Cottage. 
What between her suspicious belief that 
her false-hearted Sebastian lived by say- 
ing soft things in dark corners, and her 
dread lest even the raggedest edges of 
Leam’s affection should envelop a stran- 
ger, Pepita’s fiery heart had ever been in 
a tempest during the stay of each suc- 
cessive mistress and rival, and the tem- 
pest she had felt, she had passed on to 
others. Mr. Dundas, who cared less for 
his daughter than for ease of personal 
living — that is, as much ease as was pos- 
sible with such a tumultuous domestic 
difficulty as his wife — gave up the con- 
test when Learn was about twelve years 
of age, saying in self-justification, when 
his friends ventured to remonstrate, “ She 
is her mother’s child, not mine, and I 
can do no more wfith the one than with 
the other.’’ 

Though Learn went every day to .Li- 
onnet with her mother, no one there 
knew her the better for her frequency 
of presence. Sometimes Josephine Har- 
rowby would try to take her in hand to 
see what she was like. But even she, 
good-natured and simple-hearted, and 
by no means on such mental heights 
as need have frightened the girl, had to 
confess that she could make nothing of 
her. Madame had given up the attempt 
long ago, and had not cared to renew 
it. Learn used to sit with her mournful 
eyes fixed on her mother — that mother’s ' 
younger likeness — like a soul in pain 
oppressed with a very incubus of love 
and sorrow, watching her with a gaze 
half frightened, half adoring, only long- 
ing for her to be silent and let them go 
away and be together and alone again, 
but afraid to utter a sound or to make a 
sign. 

In the circle of suffering with which 
this unhappy Pepita surrounded her 
world, the child whom she loved with 
such intensity perhaps suffered the niost. 
Life was like a hideous nightmare to 
Learn at this time, and she came into 
more inner consciousness than she had 
ever yet had from the new kind of fear 
that possessed her — not of, so much as 
for, her mother. How glad she would 
be when the summer was over! she 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


51 


thought. Her mother would not surely 
go out so much then, and they would 
return to the old happy indolent life to 
which Learn was getting so dangerously 
accustomed — with nothing to think of, 
nothing to do, no one to see or to talk to, 
only dolls to dress and the zambomba 
to strike. How she hated all these peo- 
ple ! Josephine Harrowby was perhaps 
the least detestable, but she was only a 
white mouse, as mamma called her, with 
veins filled with milk and flesh made of 
curds. But madame and the rector, how 
odious they were ! and how tiresome and 
detestable they all were when they would 
speak to her and she never knew what 
to answer ! 

It was all very well to go sometimes to 
see madame and talk to her of las cosas 
de EspaHa, she thought, but every day 
was too much even for Beam’s patriot- 
ism of imagination ; and she had never 
mentally accused her mother of bad 
taste before. 

Learn, in the full force of youthful 
thoroughness, thought her mother’s hon- 
esty of speech and unrestrained savagery 
of candor the grandest qualities in. the 
world. She was mamma, and had a 
right to say and do as she liked. But 
why she abandoned her old habits for 
this new woman — why she went there 
day after day, sat still and kept quiet, 
and was amiable and self-restrained 
when she hated her in her heart, and 
said so as soon as she left the house — 
was a mystery beyond the girl’s power 
to divine. She looked, wondered, sighed, 
lamented ; but her pathetic eyes pleaded 
in. vain. Not even for Learn could Pepita 
forego her desires ; and her knowledge 
of how much her little daughter suffered 
in this sudden uprooting of her life’s 
habits affected her no more than if it was 
the disquiet of a dream, and Madame la 
Marquise de Montfort was the sole reality 
of life. 


CHAPTER X. 

THE POMEGRANATE BUD. 

One day Pepita and Learn went to 
Lionnet as usual. As usual, also, Pepita 


began to pound madame in her interro- 
gatory mortar on las cosas de Espana, 
while madame gathered up the skirts of 
her wits to enable her to slip from under 
the pestle so dexterously that she should 
not show she had slipped at all — attempt- 
ing that most difficult feat of intellectual 
gymnastics, how to satisfy critical curios- 
ity without betraying ignorance. While 
the one was thus occupied in questioning, 
and the other in evading while seeming 
to reply, Mrs. Corfield and her son Alick 
came in. 

No one, judging by the light of Nature 
and the doctrine of hereditary character- 
istics, would have said that these were 
mother and son. Mrs. Corfield’s small 
spare figure, bird-like in its activities and 
jerky in its movements, had not trans- 
mitted a line of itself to her son's lum- 
bering, elephantine form, measuring six 
feet two, military standard ; and her 
sharp face, with its keen black eyes set, 
monkey-like, close together, razor-shaped 
nose, thin lips and untiring mobility, was 
as little repeated in his as was the plan 
of the bony framework. His eyes were 
large, light-gray, uncertain, wandering; 
his nose was a blunt unfinished knob 
cast roughly against his face, and not 
gone over with the modeling tool ; and 
his mouth, uneven and out of drawing, 
was large and clumsy, with cracked and 
swollen lips. His manners were shy, his 
gestures slow and sprawling; but even 
those who laughed at him most were 
forced to acknowledge that if the crock 
was homely the treasure it held was of 
the finest gold. It was impossible to 
allow Alick Corfield the smallest artistic 
merit, but it was also as impossible not 
to admit that if the most awkward fellow 
that ever shambled on two ungainly legs, 
he was one of the best and purest-hearted. 
He was a modern Beast, as yet wanting 
the Beauty which should bring him into 
noble shape. 

By the look of things he was not like- 
ly to find her at North Aston ; for even 
Carry Fairbairn’s catholic philanthropy 
deserted her when Alick Corfield mean- 
dered across her path ; and if Carry Fair- 
bairn could not tolerate him, who would ? 
But ever since she had been teased at 


52 


THE ATONEMENT OE TEAM DUNDAS. 


home about his manifest admiration for 
her — he had once had a kind of romantic 
worship for the “wild rose,” as he used 
to call her in his unpublished sonnets, 
which had made him supremely ridic- 
ulous — she had treated him as disdain- 
fully as if he had insulted her. It had 
had one good effect — that of curing him 
of his boyish fancy and dispelling the 
delusive moonshine that had begun to 
gather in a misleading aureole about her 
pretty, curly, brainless head. 

Kept in such strict seclusion by her 
mother for the one part, shy, ignorant, 
taciturn on her own account for the other. 
Learn, though a native born and bred, 
was, as has been said, substantially a 
stranger to North Aston. 

This was the first time for three years 
that Alick or Mrs. Corfield had met her; 
for, as she never went to church, and 
until the odd craze of her mother for ma- 
dame as little anywhere else, she was not 
likely to be known of the local confra- 
ternity, and her presence at Lionnet 
to-day had all the charms that lie round 
novelty. 

“What an odd figure!” thought Sarah 
Corfield as she stared at the child sitting 
there in her mantilla, with her square 
bow of blue-and-white ribbon stuck in 
the thick coils of her dark hair. “What 
a shame of Sebastian Dundas to let that 
maniac of his dress up his daughter like 
a dancing'girl at a fair I I will soon put 
all that to rights when I get her into my 
hands, as I will.” 

“How beautiful! — like an unopened 
pomegranate bud, a young queen among 
the flowers, not knowing her own royal- 
ty,” thought Alick, whose dangerous trick 
of idealizing and delicate poetic fancy, 
such as by the unjust analogy of appear- 
ances no one would have expected from 
such an unfinished exterior, were power- 
fully excited by the sight of this dark- 
eyed, silent, superb young child of Spain. 

Mrs. Corfield, intent on her work of 
reconstruction, made her way straight to 
Learn. “Why, Learn! you are quite a 
stranger, child,” she said with that fa- 
miliarity of older folks who have seen 
the young people in long clothes, and 
have consequently no kind of respect 


for them ; to whom, indeed, these young 
people are always in a manner children 
whom it would be absurd to treat with 
respect. 

Learn looked at her with the unutter- 
able tragedy of expression bestowed on 
her by Nature. “Yes,” she said briefly. 

“One never sees you, child: what do 
you do with yourself all day ?” continued 
Mrs. Corfield, thinking how she could 
best work round to her ultimate inten- 
tion, that of vilifying her headgear. 

“ Mamma does not go out,” said Learn 
reluctantly. Why should this little, sharp- 
faced woman persecute |^er with her talk ? 

“But if your mamma cannot go out — 
though I must say it would be a great 
deal better for her if she did — why do you 
not come amongst your young friends ? 
It is not good to be shut up as you are. 
You should be with the other girls, like 
one of them. You make yourself quite 
singular, hiding yourself as you do.” 

“ Mamma does not go out,” repeated 
Learn. 

“But you ought, if she does not,” re- 
iterated Mrs. Corfield. 

Learn looked a set speech in blank 
verse. By her face you might have said 
she was oppressed with noble thoughts, 
keeping back by an effort a flood of elo- 
quent speech. In reality she was saying 
to herself, “ What does this little rat-tooth 
wish me to say ?” 

“ I am giving a lawn - party the day 
after to-morrow,” continued Mrs. Cor- 
field, needlessly alarmed at the girl’s 
tragic expression and unspoken Alex- 
andrines. “Now come to it, like a good 
child, and don’t hide yourself away in 
this absurd manner. Take off that lace 
thing and take off that funny bow : they 
don’t become you, and they look odd in 
the daytime, and make the other girls 
laugh at you. Put on a nice rational 
English hat and feather, and come 
among us like a sensible creature, as I 
dare say you are when you are found 
out. But, good gracious ! you might be 
some heathen princess of Morocco for 
what anybody knows of you. And when 
one does see you, you are so unlike any 
one else one scarcely knows what to 
make of you. You are not a bit like 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


an English girl in that absurd dress of 
yours.” 

” I am not English,” said Learn proud- 
ly, her face on fire. 

‘‘Why, you silly child, how can you be 
anything else ?” laughed Mrs. Corfield. 
‘‘Your father is English: what should 
you be but English ?” 

‘‘Mamma is a Spaniard — an Anda- 
lusian,” said Learn, fixing her mournful 
eyes on Mrs. Corfield steadily* 

‘‘ But don’t you know that the nation- 
ality of the children follows the father, 
not the mother V returned the lady with 
her argumentative air, settling the matter 
beyond dispute. 

‘‘ I am Spanish,” repeated Learn, im- 
pervious to argument. 

‘‘Tut! tut! don’t I tell you that the 
nationality of the children follows the 
father, not the mother?” reiterated Mrs. 
Corfield, setting herself to her task of 
proving and convincing. ‘‘You were 
born in England, brought up in Eng- 
land, your father is an English landed 
proprietor, as were his fathers before 
him : how should you not be an English 
girl ? The mere fact of having a Span- 
ish mother alters none of these things. 
You are English, root and branch, and 
no talking in the world could make you 
otherwise.” 

‘‘Mamma is a Spaniard and I am a 
Spaniard,” again said Learn, doggedly, 
pertinaciously. 

‘‘What an obstinate little monkey you 
are !” cried Mrs. Corfield, half impatient, 
half amused. 

‘‘I may be a monkey, but I am a 
Spaniard all the same,” repeated Learn 
with grave disdain. ‘‘And I would rath- 
er be a Spanish monkey than an Eng- 
lish miss,” she added, looking at her 
mother. 

To which Mrs. Corfield snapped out, in 
a tone that meant unconditional repudi- 
ation of so hopeless a subject, ‘‘ I believe 
you are right, Learn. There is nothing 
English about you but your name, and 
that is not a Christian one, like any 
other girl’s — called after a river like a 
heathen goddess. I wonder how your 
father could ?” 

‘‘No, it is not like another’s, and I am 


53 

glad,” answered Learn, her proud, per- 
sistent little face set like a mask. 

Mrs. Corfield, who disliked opposition, 
turned away in a rage. Though a good 
soul, none better, she had an irritable tem- 
per — ‘‘tangential,” as the doctor mildly 
called her when she swept the dust about 
his ears — and especially was she tangen- 
tial when opposed by the young. 

‘‘What is that crooked stick of an Eng- 
lishwoman saying to you, my heart?” 
cried out Pepita in Spanish. 

She knew her daughter’s face as well 
as her daughter knew hers. 

‘‘She says I am English, mamma,” 
said Learn with an air of pathetic pride. 

Pepita turned furiously to Mrs. Cor- 
field. ‘‘No, you are wrong,” she cried 
in a loud voice. ‘‘You English are the 
children of Judas, and we are the daugh- 
ters of the blessed St. Jago. 1 should 
hate my little Leama if I thought she 
was degraded to the level of the frogs 
we live amongst as the purgatory for 
our sins. We are children of Andalusia, 
beautiful Andalusia, she and I : we have 
the sun in our blood — you have only 
frogs and frosts.” 

‘‘ Do not be angry with us if we wish 
to claim your daughter,” said madame 
graciously. ‘‘ She is too beautiful a prize 
to be parted with. You too, as the wife 
of an Englishman, belong to us. If you 
do not like your captivity, you are none 
the less a captive, and have to wear the 
chain of flowers which binds you.” 

This was said very sweetly, but ma- 
dame knew that Pepita hated her cap- 
tivity, and did not believe her chain to 
be one of flowers. 

‘‘ One misfortune need not make two,” 
said Pepita, with more sense of dialec- 
tics than she had cfedit for. ‘‘If I was 
unlucky enough to make myself the wife 
of an Englishman, I need not have the 
disgrace of your nationality added to it.” 

‘‘Still, for very love of you we must 
claim you,” continued madame with her 
fluent smoothness. 

‘‘And for want of love of you I say 
that neither I nor mine belongs to you,” 
cried Pepita, snapping her fingers. 

‘‘You need not get angry, Mrs. Dun- 
das,” put in her husband with an insulting 


54 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DU NBAS. 


air. “If madameisgracious enough to say 
kind things to you, that does not prove 
anything. We English may not be so 
an^^ious to claim you, after all.” 

“And at all events, dear sehora,” add- 
ed Madame de Montfort soothingly, “our 
admiration of you cannot offend you, and 
you are a Spaniard all the same. Still, it 
is good to conform to the customs of the 
country where you are. The queen said 
those very words to me the last time I 
saw her in Paris. ‘ Ah, little one !’ she 
said — the dear gracious saint ! — ‘ though 
I am a Spaniard to my heart’s core, these 
good Parisians would not know me from 
one of themselves. It is the wisdom of 
life.’ And what she says we may be- 
lieve, may we not, senora?’’ 

“There is sense in that,’’ said Pepita 
sulkily. 

But the charm was wrought, and she 
wa,s silent and subdued for the next few 
minutes. The “loyalty” of the low- 
bred, ignorant worshiper of rank was 
as strong in her as a religion ; and if 
the queen had advocated murder, Pepita 
^ would have canonized the assassins. Per- 
haps that would not have cost her much 
moral effort, on the whole. The strug- 
gle would have been if, by some miracle, 
Isabella had discarded the saints and the 
Holy Father and had insisted on adhe- 
rence to pigs and Protestants. 

“You have never been to Spain, Miss 
Dundas, have you ?” asked Alick, sham- 
bling up to Learn, at whom he had been 
staring all this time. 

She looked at him for an instant, then 
turned away her eyes with girlish scorn. 
Though no shadow of the manly life had 
as yet been thrown across her path, and 
though she was therefore supremely in- 
different to men’s homeliness or their 
beauty, yet Alick Corfield was so uncom- 
promisingly ugly she could not forbear 
tq despise him, and to show that she did. 
Then she turned her eyes to her mother, 
so beautiful to look at — the centre of all 
life and charm to her. 

“ No,” she answered shortly, “ not yet.” 

“Not yet? Then you are going some 
tim^ ?” he said in a grieved voice. 

He thought North Aston would be 
duller than it had ever been if Learn 


Dundas left it, now that he had seen her. 
The little royal unopened pomegranate 
blossom that she was, she had stirred his 
fancy like a new poem. And indeed was 
she not a new poem ? — a poem no one had 
yet read, but into which he might some 
day — who knows ? — have rich and lovely 
glimpses if only he could break down 
that shyness, that exclusiveness and that 
^contempt of her father’s race which kept 
her so far apart, like a stranger in her 
own home. 

“Of course,” said Learn superbly. 
How could he ask such a silly question ? 

“When ?” 

She looked at him even more scorn- 
fully than before. “When I am a wo- 
man,” she said. “Mamma and I will 
live in Spain then.” 

“And leave England ?” 

“Yes: I hate England.” 

“Oh, I hope you will not always hate 
it,” said Alick, writhing awkwardly on 
his chair and blushing painfully. 

“ I always shall,” Learn answered sol- 
emnly: “mamma hates it.” 

“ But you know so little of it,” plead- 
ed Alick. 

“ I know it all ; and it is all horrid,” 
said Learn. 

“What! North Aston?” he cried. 

“Yes, horrid and ugly too,” she said 
stonily. 

“Why, it is lovely!” exclaimed Alick 
with enthusiastic remonstrance. 

“You talk nonsense,” returned Learn 
in her grave superiority. “ Mamma says 
it is ugly, and mamma knows.” 

“ Indeed, Miss Dundas — ” began Alick. 

“I am la senorita,” interrupted Learn 
with supreme pride : “ I am a Spanish 
senorita, not an English miss.” 

“I beg your pardon, senorita,” con- 
tinued Alick — Learn looked at him with 
an air of tragic satisfaction — “but in- 
deed you cannot know the scenery about 
North Aston, else you could not call it 
ugly,” he urged again. “ There are some 
of the most splendid views you can im- 
agine about here — from the top of Steel’s 
Wood, on the moor, by the Water’s Meet, 
from Dunaston — oh, many places ! And 
then the wild flowers ! We have the 
most exquisite flowers here — rare ones. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


55 


too, not found anywhere else in Eng- 
land.” 

‘‘Wild flowers?” repeated Learn, 
‘‘There are no flowers in England.” 

Alick smiled uneasily. 

‘‘>0ne or two in hothouses perhaps,” 
said Learn with scornful condescension, 
‘‘but they are not so good as ours.” 

‘‘I assure you we have wild flowers,” 
said Alick in a boyish, eager kind of 
way. ‘‘ There are hundreds here — beau-* 
tiful flowers, quite as lovely as the gar- 
den ones. You ought to ramble about 
the woods and fields, and then you 
would see them.” 

Learn shook her head. ‘‘ Mamma says 
there are none, and mamma knows,” 
she repeated as before. 

‘‘But, indeed — ” began Alick again. 

‘‘ I do not believe you,” said Learn. 

‘‘ Will you believe me if I bring you a 
basketful to-morrow ?” asked Alick. He 
had taken it to heart to convince this 
skeptical little girl-queen that England 
held objects worthy of her regard. 

Learn shook her head again. ‘‘ I do 
not want to believe,” she said. 

‘‘But you want to know the truth?” 
urged Alick. 

‘‘Oh no, I do not,” answered Learn. 

‘‘Not want to know the truth?” re- 
peated Alick, aghast — he to whom the 
most literal exactness was part of the 
necessity of life. 

‘‘No,” said Learn stolidly. ‘‘What 
good does it do ?” 

‘‘ But the truth is all we have to live 
for,” cried Alick. ‘‘ If we have not truth 
we have nothing.” 

‘‘ I do not know what you mean,” said 
Learn with a sigh of weariness. The 
strain on her mental faculties by so much 
talking was getting beyond her, even in 
its simpler aspect : going into the region 
of abstract ethics was more than she could 
bear. ‘‘ One tells lies when one must, and 
one must very often,” she added. 

Alick got very red, and shifted on his 
chair uneasily. That men should tell 
falsehoods on occasion seemed to him 
one of the most mournful facts of human 
history — a vice leading to all manner of 
crimes, itself perhaps the greatest. But 
that a person should openly confess not 


only to the need but the practice of false- 
hood, and that person his girl-queen, his 
unread poem, gave him a moral shock 
he could not for a moment overcome. 
He was glad his mother had not heard 
her. He himself graduated in his first 
lesson of concealment, his first step too 
of independent life, in this content that 
his mother had not heard Learn Dundas 
confess she did not care for truth, and 
told lies when it suited her. 

‘‘ What are you saying to my daugh- 
ter?” asked Pepita jealously. ‘‘I do not 
like young men to talk to my daughter 
apart. We Andalusian mothers are not 
like your English women, who let their 
daughters run to the right and the left 
with no one to look after them. We take 
care of ours, and ask the Holy Mother 
to help us.” 

Poor Alick blushed again, painfully as 
before. To his honest heart there was 
no more harm in talking to Learn, or in 
idealizing her as his pomegranate bud, 
than there was in looking at the sunlight 
on the lawn. ‘‘ I was saying nothing,” he 
stammered in inexplicable confusion. 

‘‘Then you must be very stupid to sit 
and talk and say nothing,” said pitiless 
Pepita. ‘‘A Spaniard would not be so 
absurd,” contemptuously. 

‘‘ He said that there were flowers here, 
mamma — wild in the woods,” said Learn, 
turning her grave face to her mother and 
speaking in the tone of one morally in- 
jured. 

‘‘Flowers!” cried Pepita with unutter- 
able disdain. ‘‘We call those things 
weeds in Spain.” 

“There!” said Learn triumphantly, 
“ I told you so.” 

“You should see our flowers in Spain,” 
then cried Pepita, following up the strain, 
but not ill-temperedly. “ Those are flow- 
ers — not like these miserable little drops 
of white and yellow you call daisies and 
buttercups, but pomegranates, and myr- 
tles, and orange-flowers, and oleanders. 
Ah ! those are flowers — with roses you 
can bury your face in, and jessamines as 
big as stars. And the fruit! You call 
your sour green stones fruit ! A Span- 
iard would give them to his enemy’s 
pigs when he wanted to poison tliem.” 


56 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DVNDAS. 


“ I know how beautiful things must be 
in Spain, and I should like to go there 
and see them all,” answered Alick. ” But 
if we have not got things so good in Eng- 
land, it is only wise to make the best of 
what we have, is it not ? We cannot all 
be Spaniards,” he added, as if he would 
have been one if he could. Perhaps he 
would, to be Beam’s compatriot. 

“No,” said Pepita, as if this was a pro- 
found reflection to which she assented on 
mature consideration, ” heaven is not for 
all, and cows cannot be lions.” 

‘‘Nor wild roses pomegranates,” re- 
turned Alick, mentally contrasting Carry 
Fairbairn with Learn Dundas. 

Pepita stared at him. Something in 
his homely face seemed to waken a kind- 
ly chord in her rough-hewn heart. ‘‘You 
are ugly,” she said frankly, ‘‘ but you look 
good. You may come and see me if you 
don’t stay too long or come too often.” 

Mrs. Corfield heard this conditional 
invitation. She had already forgiven 
Learn, and was pleased to see these 
two odd creatures take kindly to her 
treasure. Though she was as anxious 
about Alick’s minor morals as if he had 
been a village maiden canvassing for 
the rosiere, and looked sharply after the 
young ladies of the place, thinking no 
one good enough for her boy, and that 
all were trying to get him, she could not 
see much danger here. A fat if still beau- 
tiful matron, and a lean, brown child, with 
big eyes and a wooden manner, had no 
elements of peril to alarm to her; so she 
welcomed the invitation — which, little 
flattering as it was, w^as a unique record 
in Pepita’s unwritten diary — as not only 
promising a little change for her beloved, 
but also as opening the way for her own 
future setting to rights of what was now 
to her mind all to wrongs. 

As her share in the transaction she re- 
peated her request for Learn to come to 
her garden-party the day after to-morrow, 
and she wisely ignored the matter of the 
mantilla. 

‘‘Would you like it, my heart?” asked 
Pepita. 

Learn fastened her serious eyes on her 
mother’s face. By the look of her it 
would seem as if she had been asked 


to fix the date of her execution. ‘‘Not 
without you, mamma,” she said. 

‘‘ Oh yes. Miss Dundas — senorita,” cor- 
recting himself — ^“do come, please,” cried 
Alick. ” I will show you so many things 
to interest you if you will — feathers and 
eggs and mosses and ferns: do come.” 

‘‘My little Leama, say, would you like 
it ?” her mother asked again with un- 
wonted softness. 

* Learn looked at Alick. The prayer of 
his heart, stamped like a printed word 
on his honest clumsy face, touched her 
with the first sensation of womanly pow- 
er. It was a new expression that shot 
like living light from her splendid eyes 
— a new turn in the pose of her small 
proud head and in the action of her 
hand, flirting her fan as only a Spaniard 
can — as she answered, still looking su- 
perbly at Alick, but speaking to her 
mother, ‘‘Yes, mamma, let us go. But 
you too,” she added anxiously, touching 
her gown with a clinging gesture. 

The new look of womanly power faded 
away as rapidly as it had come, and she 
was once more only the shy, half-fright- 
ened little girl, holding to her mother’s 
hand with a tenacity of love almost be- 
yond nature. 

‘‘We will come,” said Pepita royally; 
and even Sarah Corfield, for all her mar- 
tinet temper and mistress air, had to re- 
ceive her acceptance as condescension. 

‘‘Now, Mrs. Dundas, shall I take you 
home?” said her husband in a peevish 
tone. 

His pleasant afternoon had been de- 
stroyed, and he was angry with all the 
world, but chief of all with Pepita — with 
whom should a man be angry if not with 
his wife ? — and as his day was broken 
pitilessly, he might as well leave the frag- 
ments without more delay. 

It had promised so well in the begin- 
ning, and had ended so ill ! He had 
been told off to arrange a cabinet of geo- 
logical specimens for madame. They 
were all in confusion now as to strati- 
fication and era, but each was carefully 
labeled, and she had written out the list 
— from memory she told him — as to the 
order in which they ought to be arranged. 
They were specimens she had collected 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


57 


with her husband, she said, and each 
fragment represented some sweet day and 
hour of the dear past. 

It was odd that she had at the moment 
in her pocket the bill of a local geologist 
for a beginner s cabinet — not paid. 

“ English dog, I will not be taken by 
you at all, nor will I go till I like,” an- 
swered Pepita in Spanish. 

‘‘Ah, senora !” said suave Madame de 
Montfort, ‘‘1 hear by your voice that you 
are assenting to your husband’s request 
in your pretty Spanish way — that grand 
old Castilian tongue. I am so sorry you 
must go !” 

‘‘But I am not going,” said Pepita, by 
no means suavely. 

‘‘No? Then I am glad,” answered 
madame in just the same tone of voice 
and with the same placid smile. ‘‘ Let 
me put you into this easy-chair, with 
these cushions and footstool, and make 
you comfortable. Unfortunately, I am 
obliged to go to dear Mrs. Birkett’s, but 
that is no reason why you and la sehorita 
should not stay here as long as you like.” 

‘‘You talk like a foolish woman,” said 
Pepita roughly. ‘‘Do you think there is 
any pleasure to me in staring at your 
ugly sea-sick paper ? If you are not here 
to talk to me of Spain, why should I care 
to stay ? Come, little one, let us go. 
Brigand,” to her husband, always in 
Spanish, ‘‘am I to wait here all the day 
for you ? Will you never leave off show- 
ing those wolf’s teeth of yours in your 
idiotic laughs? You take care never to 
laugh at home.” 

‘‘Do men laugh who live in hell?” 
returned Mr. Dundas bitterly. 

‘‘ If you were a good son you would 
appreciate better the home of your fath- 
er and of all your generation,” retorted 
Pepita with a scornful laugh. ‘‘Come, 
my angel,” to Learn. ‘‘ If it were not 
for thee, heart of my heart, my life would 
be one long eternal night.” 

‘‘And mine without you, mamma,” 
said Learn in a responsive voice, sweep- 
ing past her father scornfully. 

‘‘ How I wish I could understand all 
those pretty things you say !” sighed 
madame. 

‘‘You must be a very foolish woman 


to have forgotten,” replied Pepita. ‘‘To 
think of your having lived with our queen 
at El Corte, and that you have now for- 
gotten our tongue ! You are stupid.” 

‘‘ I know 1 am,” replied madame sweet- 
ly, ‘‘but,” making a bold shot^ ‘‘your 
Spanish does not seem to me quite like 
the court language I was accustomed to 
hear. Perhaps it is purer.” 

‘‘Perhaps it is,” said Pepita. Then 
rolling out half a dozen opprobrious epi- 
thets in patois, she looked up into ma- 
dame’s face and asked, ‘‘ Do you under- 
stand that ?” mockingly. 

‘‘No,” said madame. ‘‘Have I lost 
much ?” 

‘‘Your face is a looking-glass,” replied 
Pepita with an insolent gesture as she 
passed through the doorway. 


CHAPTER XI. 

AMONG PITFALLS. 

It was a fine day for the garden-party 
at Steel’s Corner, and all North Aston 
was there. This ‘‘all” meant no such 
multitudinous gathering at its fullest, not 
even when, as now, ‘‘company” was 
staying both with the Fairbairns and the 
Corfields themselves, and Frank Har- 
rowby, the local eupatrid of the second 
degree, was at the Hill. 

But people who are accustomed to 
small measures are satisfied with modest 
magnitude ; and Mrs. Corfield was as- 
sumed to have achieved a success in that 
she had a .learned professor who cared 
for nothing on earth but Greek and Ger- 
man, his wife who lived only to perfect 
her hortus siccus, and his daughter, who 
was pretty though advanced,, eloquent 
on the rights of wom^ and the iniquities 
of men, and who discussed without blush- 
ing the details of doubtful subjects which 
her grandmother at sixty scarcely under- 
stood and never mentioned above her 
breath. In addition to these were three 
young Oxonians from the Limes to bright- 
en up the girls and make the young men 
of the place uneasy; and to crown all 
there came in due course Pepita, Learn, 
and Madame la Marquise de Montfort. 

Mrs. Dundas, with her splendid beauty 


58 


THE. ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


and foreign dress, made a telling point 
that interested strangers, if North As- 
tonians themselves could have spared 
her without lamentation. They knew 
her, and knowledge had conquered in- 
terest and created in its place disgust. 
But Learn was an acquisition, in that she 
too wore the high comb, mantilla and 
bright-colored square bows in her hair 
which were Pepita’s social virtues ; car- 
ried a large black fan, which she furled, 
unfurled, raised, lowered and used as 
only a Spaniard can ; had superb eyes 
and a tragic face ; was proud, taciturn 
and young; and thus brought with her 
the sentiment of novelty and something 
that had to be found out. 

As for madame, she was always an ac- 
quisition. Between her gracious sweet- 
ness and never-ceasing anecdotes she 
kept her world amused ; and the croquet- 
players wanted specially to see her at 
the hoops. For which cause she was 
held the greatest acquisition of all. 

She had told the Harrowbys that be- 
fore her marriage she had been one of 
the lady champion-players. “Of Eng- 
land ?’’ asked Miss Harrowby simply, 
thinking that now she had driven in a 
peg whereon they could hang more than 
a mere theory whereon they could found 
an undeniable demonstration. For, as 
all the archives of croquet were carefully 
stowed away in the library at the Hill, 
they could verify her statement by mak- 
ing her point out the match in which she 
had played and the name she had then 
borne. 

But when Maria had said, “Of Eng- 
land ?’’ madame had smiled and answer- 
ed softly, “No, I was not in England 
then and the peg had broken, and the 
demonstration collapsed, as all the rest 
had done. 

Nevertheless, the elder two Miss Har- 
rowbys so far believed in her that they 
expected her to help them with her ad- 
vice to-day. They quite relied on her to 
coach them into better form, according 
to Cyril Fairbairn’s vernacular, than that 
which they had been able to acquire from 
the doubtful teaching of manuals and the 
contradictory counsels of stray visitors, 
even though helped by as much devotion 


( and hard work as would have enabled 
them to take honors in one of the exact 
sciences. If she could teach them better 
things than they already knew in croquet, 
Maria and Fanny Harrowby felt they 
would forgive her all they did not under- 
stand, and lake her on trust for the re- 
mainder. 

When they came up to her, however, 
shouldering their mallets and trying the 
run of the balls like people thoroughly 
in earnest, madame — looking supremely 
lovely in her black weeds in contrast 
to their light summer dresses — besought 
them so earnestly not to ask her to take 
part in the game, not even to the extent 
of looking on or giving advice, that they 
had nothing for it but to give her up to 
the rector and do the best they could with 
their own unassisted lights. 

“ I am so sorry you paid me the com- 
pliment of wishing for my opinion,” she 
said sweetly; “but indeed I could not. 
It is too full of treasured memories, and 
it wo.uld open all my wounds afresh.” 

What could be done ? It was a severe 
disappointment, but we all have to bear 
with disappointment, and is not grace 
best proved by trial ? Croquet was a 
kind of secular religion to the Harrow- 
by girls, and had its orthodox develop- 
ments and its heretical. It had been a 
vital point with them to know on which 
side Madame de Montfort, lady-cham- 
pion of — where ? — ranged herself, and 
what laws ruled her in the matters of 
taking off and the like. 

But again, as has been said, what could 
they do ? Time would soften her present 
grief, as it would substitute silk for crape 
and rose-color for black, and then per- 
haps she w'ould take up her mallet and 
develop her principles. Meanwhile they 
must content themselves with their own 
principles, and in spite of Adelaide’s cold 
eyes and scornful smile and Frank’s rath- 
er cruel “ chaff” allow madame to escape 
her ordeal and beat a retreat beneath the 
lime trees with the faithful rector as her 
body-guard. 

Mr. Dundas was in the set, and for 
the first time in his life blasphemed Cash- 
iobury. 

“ She knows no more of croquet than 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


59 


I she does of Spain,” whispered Adelaide 
to Frank ; and Frank nodded back as 
I his answer, ” But she is too clever to be 
caught. My opinion is, that she is the 
cleverest woman out.” 

‘‘And the worst,” replied Adelaide 
viciously. 

‘‘ Hardly,” said Frank. ‘‘ I have known 
a few that I think could give her long 
odds in wickedness and beat her.” 

‘‘ Impossible !” cried the rector’s daugh- 
ter, just as m.adame, by the rector’s side, 
turned into the lime-tree walk and con- 
sidered what it would be best to say. 

‘‘ I am afraid I disappointed those dear 
Harrowby girls, but I really could not 
help it. With the best will in the world 
I could not nerve myself,” she began 
tremulously. ‘‘Perhaps, indeed, I ought 
not to have come to such a festive scene T' 
she added, looking up into her clerical 
companion’s handsome face with a touch- 
ing air of self-reproach — a penitent dud- 
fully waiting on spiritual condemnation 
or absolution as might be accorded. 

‘‘Oh, those silly girls can wait,” said 
the rector hastily. ‘‘And as for your 
' coming here, what impropriety can there 
be in joining a friendly little meeting like 
this ? If we were alarge community, num- 
bering many strangers among us, it 
would be different, but we are almost 
like one family.” 

‘‘A family ruled over by a very effici- 
ent and delightful head — a head that 
makes one understand pastoral times,” 
said madame prettily, as if the new 
thought of the rector’s pleasant chief- 
tainship had diverted her mind from 
grief to gratitude. 

The military -looking pastor smiled 
down on her with an air of fatherly af- 
fection and official satisfaction commin- 
gled. He overlooked the little slip be- 
tween ‘‘ pastoral ” and ‘‘ patriarchal,” and 
accepted the spirit of her praise as it was 
intended. In years gone by he might 
have preferred to have been told that he 
had missed his vocation and spoilt a good 
general to make an unappreciated par- 
son — that he was a pearl of price de- 
graded from its fit setting in a conqueror’s 
crown to be cast before a handful of clod- 
born swine who knew nothing of its value. 


and would have been better contented 
with husks and draff. Now he recognized 
that the clerical profession had its ad- 
vantages, and that to be the appointed 
shepherd of such a ewe -lamb as Ma- 
dame la Marquise de Montfort was a 
function not to be despised in a man’s 
estimate of treasures. Still, he would 
not allow himself to be puffed up even 
by her delicious praise. 

‘‘ Perhaps my headship is not always 
appreciated,” he answered with a mel- 
ancholy a'ir. ‘‘Families are self-willed 
at times, and mine is no exception to 
the rule.” 

‘‘ It would be only through the greatest 
ignorance if your rule was not approv- 
ed of, dear Mr. Birkett,” she returned. 
‘‘Where would the poor be? — where in- 
deed should we all be ?” she cried in a 
fine acknowledgment of equality with 
sinners. 

‘‘As for the poor, I do my best for 
them', I admit ; but it is uphill work, dear 
madame — has been all my life,” he an- 
swered with a sigh. 

Had he consecrated himself to the task 
of winning souls like some old monk 
vowed to renunciation of the soft things 
of life from youth upward, instead of 
taking all the pleasures of the flesh as 
he took his twenty-seven port, with de- 
corous generosity like a gentleman, he 
could not have sighed with a deeper ex- 
pression of unrewarded effort. No one 
would have thought how easily he had 
taken his hill, how comfortably he had 
slept in the arbors by the way, and how 
little strain that pack of dull bucolic souls, 
which it was his business to drag up to 
celestial heights at the cost of three pounds 
apiece, had been on his clerical shoulders. 
Perhaps he did not know it himself. The 
fancy plays strange tricks with the intel- 
lect, and more men are self-deceivers 
than conscious hypocrites — save, indeed, 
when they have to conceal their family 
skeletons, and then terror conquers truth, 
and the hypocrisy which locks the door 
is held superior to the candor which would 
open it. 

‘‘ That is what my dear father used to 
say,” replied madame sympathetically. 
‘‘He was Mmost broken-hearted at the 


6o 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


ingratitude of his people — he who tried 
so much to do them good.” 

‘‘ I should think an American clergy- 
man’s life must be a trying one,” return- 
ed the rector, to whom, as to most men 
of his stamp and calibre, America is the 
unclean thing whence nothing good can 
come. 

“Very,” said madame. 

‘‘Where was your father’s church ?” he 
inquired. 

‘‘New York,” replied madame, plung- 
ing boldly into the safety of the vast. 

‘‘ Tell me now : the organization of 
the Episcopal Church, is it the same in 
America as it is here ?” the rector asked, 
sitting down on a garden-seat beneath 
the limes, glad of the opportunity of 
learning a little about a subject of which 
he was entirely ignorant. 

Being of the military order of mind, 
this handsome shepherd of souls, with 
his contempt for knowledge beyond and 
below his own in about equal propor- 
tions, was undeniably ignorant, and that 
on more subjects than the organization 
of the Episcopal Church in America. 

‘‘Precisely the same,” answered ma- 
dame. 

‘‘But paid by pew-rents, I suppose ?” 

‘‘ No,” said madame, remembering how 
her real, not phantasmal, father — the ve- 
terinary surgeon, not the New York divine 
— had growled over his allotted portion 
in the commutation which had set the 
whole parish by the ears — also of the 
family pews, like cattle-pens, that had 
gone free with the houses. Knowing no 
other system, she could devise no other 
answer, but she was becoming unpleas- 
antly conscious of pitfalls and plough- 
shares about. 

The rector, however, saw nothing. 
‘‘Where is the charge laid, then?” he 
asked. ‘‘ They have no tithes, have they ? 
How is it managed ?” 

‘‘ I can scarcely tell you all these mi- 
nute particulars,” said madame : ‘‘ I was 
so very young when we left America.” 

‘‘ Did your father die, that you left so 
young continued Mr. Birkett, in no 
wise aware that by his friendly question- 
ings he was inflicting mild torture on his 
favorite companion. 


‘‘Yes,” sighed madame; “and,” with 
a piteous look in her crumpled eyebrows 
and appealing eyes, ‘‘so painfully that I 
do not care to think of it : indeed, I can- 
not.” 

‘‘ We will talk no more of it, then,” 
said the rector kindly : ‘‘ we will speak 
of something pleasant. Tell me of your 
travels. What a strangely geographical 
life you have led ! I envy you.” It was 
the best thing of which he could think 
by way of diversion. 

‘‘ Yes, I have been about a good deal,” 
replied madame, taking his meaning at 
a venture, looking up the garden to the 
croquet-ground with a desire she dared 
not showthat some one would come down 
to her and release her from the clutches 
of her unconscious Torquemada. 

‘‘France, Spain, England, America — 
you are a traveler — a cosmopolite such 
as one does not often see. And to think 
of your settling down in such a tranquil 
little nest as North Aston !” 

‘‘ It is odd, is it not ?” she said. ‘‘ That 
was through you and dear Mrs. Birkett,” 
with a look of filial gratitude. Then, 
with a pretty playful raising of her small 
black -gloved hand, she added, ‘‘If any 
harm comes of it, I will lay it all on your 
heads.” 

‘‘And I will take that very remote 
chance for the sake of the pleasure we 
have already had, and I hope shall have 
for many years,” returned the rector gal- 
lantly. ‘‘ Some day I will get you to tell 
me the whole roll-call of your adventures 
in their fitting sequence.” 

‘‘Yes, some day I will,” said madame, 
looking at him steadily. 

‘‘But one thing has always puzzled 
me,” said the rector, crossing his legs 
and taking an attitude of reflection. 
‘‘ How is it that you, who are the daugh- 
ter of a Protestant American clergyman, 
knew the queen of Spain so well and 
married a French nobleman ?” 

‘‘That is soon told,” answered ma- 
dame with a soft, superior smile. ‘‘ Mam- 
ma was a Roman Catholic, and Spanish 
by her mother’s side. She was a great 
deal at court, and knew Madame de 
Montijo, the poor dear empress’s mam- 
ma. Monsieur le Marquis was a friend 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


of the empress’s, and brought letters to 
Her Most Gracious Majesty and my 
mamma ; and it ended as you see,” lift- 
ing both her hands. ‘‘ All these wonders 
are nothings when we come close to 
them,” she added. 

‘‘Ah, that was how you came to visit 
Spain ?” cried the rector^ with the look 
of a man who has struck the lost trail. 

‘‘Yes. When papa died we left Amer- 
ica: we went to Aranjuez by the queen’s 
invitation, and lived there with mamma’s 
old household, her old servants. And 
oh, by the bye, Mr. Birkett, that reminds 
me,” then cried madame with a kind of 
start, breaking away suddenly into a new 
country, ‘‘Wigley is talking of leaving 
me. That is the difficulty of a small 
place like this, is it not, when one has 
found the right kind of person, then 
for them to go ? Can you recommend 
me a nice steady man ? I am glad I re- 
membered to ask you. Speaking of dear 
mamma’s old servants put it into my 
head. You must excuse my abruptness.’* 

‘‘ I am sorry Wigley is leaving you,” 
said the rector after a pause. He was 
disturbed at this sudden shifting of the 
scene, for he was really interested in Ma- 
dame de Montfort and desirous of know- 
ing her true history. Not that he suspect- 
ed he had heard what was not true, but 
he wanted fuller details and exacter dates 
— from friendship rather than curiosity. 

‘‘ Should I do well to speak to him and 
ask him to stay ?” said madame. ‘‘ I 
would not do it without consulting you, 
my father confessor,” pleasantly. 

‘‘Shall I Speak to him for you ?” asked 
the rector, with a magnanimous over- 
coming of his annoyance. Who would 
not with such a sweet face, full of the 
subtle flattery of respect, that most pen- 
etrating and seductive of all modes of 
adulation, looking so tenderly into his ? 

‘‘ Thank you : how kind you are ! Yes, 
do, please. But perhaps,” she added 
after a moment’s reflection, ‘‘I had bet- 
ter speak to him myself, for” — smiling— 
‘‘ I heard of his intention to leave only in 
a kind of confidence from my nurse, and 
Wigley must not know that I know it. I 
had forgotten that when I spoke to you ; 
so perhaps I had better sound him my- 


6i 

self, and see how I can get it from him 
voluntary. We never know how these 
people will meet us. They hang togeth- 
er so closely, and seem to look on all of 
us as their enemies.” 

‘‘ Too true,” said the rector, who had 
not stared at the grammatical slip. ‘‘And 
in that case you will do it best. Neither 
Wigley nor any man, to be called a man, 
can deny what you choose to demand,” 
he added gallantly. ‘‘ Service at Madame 
de Montfort’s is an honor in itself, to be 
well counted in the wages.” 

‘‘You will make me vain,” said ma- 
dame, looking down. 

‘‘ Then I should mark you with your 
first fault,” answered Mr. Birkett. 

An honest gentleman if but a wooden- 
headed one, a good husband and mod- 
erately upright in all his dealings, this 
fair - faced daughter of a hypothetical 
father, this sorrowing widow of Simon 
de Montfort’s descendant, had cast a 
glamour about him wherein he neither 
saw nor heard things as they were. He 
would have ^aken any doubt of ma- 
dame’s absolute veracity as a personal 
insult, and of all her new-found friends 
he was perhaps the most staunch, if oth- 
ers, and notably Sebastian Dundas, run 
him hard. 

Looking up the garden to the croquet- 
ground, Frank Harrowby’s jaunty, dap- 
per figure came prominently before them. 

‘‘Do you know much of young Mr. 
Harrowby ?” asked madame suddenly. 

‘‘ Frank ? Oh yes ! I have known him 
all his life pretty well. Why do you ask ?” 
was the rector’s reply. 

‘‘ Do you like him she asked again. 

‘‘Like Frank Harrowby? Yes, well 
enough. He is a good boy on the whole 
— was a very nice boy before he went to 
London, but, between ourselves, he has 
grown conceited enough for a dozen of 
late years. Still, he is a good fellow in 
the main.” 

‘‘I don’t like him,” madame said shortly. 

‘‘No? Why not?” 

‘‘ He is abominably untruthful, and 
leads a frightfully immoral life in Lon- 
don. Don’t ask me more, nor how I 
know this ; but I do know it.” 

Madame said this with a little more 


62 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


energy than she generally used in speak- 
ing. Had it been any other than herself, 
Mr. Birkett might have even said her 
energy was spiteful. 

“ I am very, very sorry to hear all this,” 
said the rector in a severe tone. ‘‘So 
bad as that ?” 

‘‘ I would not believe him on his oath,” 
repeated m.adame. 

‘‘ Dear ! dear ! how grievous ! He did 
not tell us that he knew you,” said Mr. 
Birkett, meaning to imply that this reti- 
cence on the part of Frank had an ugly 
look with it, and so far confirmed ma- 
dame’s accusation. 

‘‘No, he does not know me,” she an- 
swered. ‘‘ It is only me who happens to 
know him. He was implicated in a mat- 
ter in which, unfortunately, I was so far 
connected as to be the receiver of the 
poor girl’s confidence. He is a wretch,” 
indignantly, ‘‘not fit to be spoken to by 
gentlemen and ladies. Oh these men !” 
she continued with strange bitterness. 
‘‘ I know something of them. So meek 
and virtuous and mealy-mouthed at 
home, and the lives they lead in London 
and Madrid ! But don’t betray me about 
Mr. Francis Harrowby,” she said anx- 
iously. 

‘‘ Surely not, but I am sorry to hear so 
bad an account of the young scoundrel,” 
answered the rector with the virtuous in- 
dignation common to sinners in the sere 
and yellow leaf when judging the follies 
of youth. 

‘‘He is very bad, there is no doubt of 
that,” returned madame; ‘‘but I may 
depend on your discretion ?” 

‘‘ My word has been passed,” said the 
rector a trifle stiffly. ‘‘Will you give me 
more particulars, for you can depend on 
me ?” 

‘‘No, dear Mr. Birkett, I will not do 
that,” madame responded gently. ‘‘ My 
word too has been passed to hold these 
confidences sacred ; and not even to you, 
dear friend and pastor, could I commit 
the dishonor of betraying confidence.” 

‘‘You are right, but I think I ought to 
know,” said the rector. ‘‘ Remember, I 
have a daughter, madame.” 

‘‘ So you have, but your curiosity must 
not be satisfied at the expense of my 


promise, and your faith in me must carry 
you over the stile,” said madame play- 
fully. ” And now I must go and speak to 
that dreadful Mrs. Dundas. I see no one 
talking to her, and she likes attention.” 

On which she rose and carried off the 
rector to where Pepita was standing in 
the full glare of the sun, watching her 
husband with a threatening face while 
shading her eyes with her fan ; Learn, 
clinging to her arm, also shading her 
eyes with her fan. 

Madame had accomplished her inten- 
tion — shot her bolt first before Frank 
had fired his, cut the ground from under 
his feet and thrown up her defence- 
works, which also were her batteries ; 
and now she had to escape from Mr. 
Birkett, whose cross-questionings were 
becoming tiresome. Not that she intend- 
ed to exchange his probe for Pepita’s 
pestle. She knew better than this how 
to arrange her difficulties, else she would 
not have been where she was to-day, the 
accepted equal of the moral and exclu- 
sive North Astonians. 

When Pepita saw her coming she 
moved her voluminous person in her 
turn to another uncomfortable-looking 
garden-seat not under the shade of trees. 

‘‘ Come and sit by me,” she said, with 
a jerk of her closed fan. ‘‘You and I 
are not English: we can talk.” 

‘‘ Willingly,” answered madame with 
her usual bland smile and complying 
sweetness of manner, but by one of those 
incomparable conversational glissades 
of hers she slipped the rector from her 
own hands on to the Spaniard’s, and in 
an instant was in the thick of a discus- 
sion between Mrs. Birkett and Mrs. Fair- 
bairn on the management of children 
and the diseases of infants before either 
knew that she had turned. 

But even here things did not go smooth- 
ly, for Mrs. Fairbairn advocated harden- 
ing, and Mrs. Birkett was all for care ; 
but when the one called the system of 
the other neglect, that other sent back 
the retort word, ‘‘ coddling.” So madame, 
to whom both appealed, was hard put to 
it not to take part with either while seem- 
ing to agree with both ; and to make 
each feel that she sided really with her. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


63 


but out of respect for the greater experi- 
ence of that other forbore more open 
demonstration, taxed even her powers 
of suggestion, considerable as they were. 
She succeeded however, this being the 
kind of thing in which she was speciiii^ly 
great. It was the secret of her success. 
And when she had turned the conversa- 
tion, which threatened to become a little 
warmer than was necessary, into the best 
method of growing peaches in pots, to 
give Mrs. Fairbairn an occasion for law- 
giving — and how she should most suc- 
cessfully mount a handworked screen, 
as one of the questions on which Mrs. 
Birkett was entitled to be heard — she 
had not only put both these ladies in 
good-humor again, but had impressed 
each with the belief that she held her 
views of life from beginning to end, 
though policy and respect together for- 
bade her to testify openly. 


CHAPTER XII. 

STRUCK DOWN. 

Presently the croquet-party broke up : 
the game was at an end, and the players 
melted into the talkers. By the power 
of attraction, consciously or unconscious- 
ly excited by Madame de Montfort, the 
gentlemen gravitated to her as of course, 
and that man was the happiest who was 
enabled to pay her the most flattering 
attention. Yet the girls there were pretty 
enough to have found admirers on their 
own merits. Carry Fairbairn, with her 
curly head and frank blue eyes, round, 
a trifle rustic, but wholesome and un- 
spoilt ; her sister Susy, darker and more 
piquant — the one the wild rose, the other 
the damask ; Adelaide Birkett, with her 
delicate features and soft fair hair, per- 
haps too cold and statuesque for some 
tastes, but of a high-bred type and un- 
deniably graceful if not always gracious ; 
Learn Dundas, like a Tragic Muse with 
her sad proud mouth and creamy skin, 
her face full of unfathomed depths, her 
magnificent eyes eloquent of unawaken- 
ed power, a creature to bewilder men 
with visions of the riper future when she 
should have come to the full splendor 


of her possibilities ; and even Josephine 
Harrowby, though thirty and freckled, 
pretty too with her English sweetness of 
face, soft and affectionate, her changing 
color and tender eyes telling of the wifely 
love and womanly submission she would 
give had she but the chance. Yes, they 
were fair and sweet enough, but Madame 
la Marquise de Montfort, the widow of 
unknown antecedents, distanced them 
all, and no other woman, young or ma- 
ture, married or single, lovely or learned, 
had a chance when she was by. And it 
would have been the same in a more 
varied society than that which had gath- 
ered on the lawn at Steel’s Corner to-day. 

She was the type of woman in whom 
most men take supreme delight. Come- 
ly by Nature and skillfully improved by 
art, her beauty was not of that turbulent 
kind which distracts as much as it charpis, 
but restful, pleasant, soothing, neither stir- 
ring the senses nor disordering the imag- 
ination — sweet, gracious, womanly, and 
nothing more. She had a low, smooth, 
level voice, a quiet but uniformly cordial 
manner, and a flood of pleasant talk that 
amused without taxing her hearers’ pow- 
ers of mind to follow or surpass. In- 
deed, she did not t^x their energies in 
any way — made no demands on them, 
and had no high standard, personal, 
intellectual or moral, which excited or 
strained them. She was always even- 
tempered, peaceable, sympathetic — was 
never in hysterics, and knew as little of 
heroics. Her views of life were bound- 
ed by the optimist doctrine of whatever 
is is right, by which she was saved a 
world of useless trouble and spiritual 
contention ; her theology was the theol- 
ogy which accepts and does not question, 
though it should include the doctrine of 
two and two making five, and the part 
being greater than the whole ; her phi- 
losophy began and ended in the one ax- 
iom that extremes meet and are danger- 
ous ; and her sociology did not range be- 
yond the two fundamental principles — 
there must be poor people and rich peo- 
ple, and the sole rights to which women 
ought to lay claim are the rights to be ' 
worshiped and worked for. But by wo- 
men she meant ladies or their imitators. 


64 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FONDAS. 


Cottagers and servants, all these wretch- 
ed creatures, must work for themselves, 
of course. They came into the division 
of class, and were not included in the 
plan. 

In short, she was a delightful compan- 
ion for the superior creature in his mo- 
ments of relaxation — just high enough 
to interest, and not so high as to fatigue ; 
and in these two words lay the secret of 
her charm. 

Presently the close-set group began to 
disintegrate. A new game vvas made up, 
Mr. Dundas and Alick Corfield both de- 
clining ; and soon madame and Mr. Dtm- 
das found themselves as if by chance 
alone under the lime trees where ma- 
dame had been with the rector half an 
hour ago, their faces turned to the wil- 
derness by the river-side. 

steep path, made difficult by a net- 
work of tree-roots and projecting rocks, 
led to an arbor facing the river and the 
valley. It was a beautiful point of view, 
and a favorite show-place for the few vis- 
itors who might drop down the stream 
to the old castle on the heights beyond. 
Madame’ had not seen it yet, and Mr. 
Dundas had more reasons than one for 
wishing to show her* the view and sit for 
a while in the safe seclusion of the arbor. 
So he carried her on, she apparently so 
engrossed in the conversation that she 
did not see they had left the lime-tree 
walk and were drifting into the wood. 

They were talking of the influence of 
women over men, and the means the 
former ought to adopt to secure the 
good-humor and satisfaction of the lat- 
ter. They forgot to reverse the medal, 
and to say anything about the means 
which men ought to adopt to secure the 
happiness of women. That was a view 
of the subject which madame was too 
politic, Sebastian Dundas too ill-mated, 
to take. 

If madame did not know where she 
was drifting, Pepita did. Sitting there 
on the lawn, her large eyes blinking 
sleepily in the sunlight, but seeing every- 
thing and suspecting more than she saw, 
she watched her husband and madame 
pass from the terrace to the wood, from 
publicity and so far security, to secresy 


and no one could say what besides. She 
knew the walk they were on. In years 
gone by she had allowed herself to be 
taken there as a visitor who would be 
interested in the view, but she had never 
gone again. Her remembrance of the 
tree-roots was as if the ground had been 
covered with petrified serpents — of the 
rocks as if they had been hiding-places 
for banditti. To this hour she shudder- 
ed at the unwholesome wildness which 
had terrified her so desperately at the 
time^ and imagination had heightened its 
horrors. She remembered the little ar- 
bor and the pleasant refuge it was, as her 
husband, then her lover, had whispered 
to her, for those seeking “ solitude for 
two.” 

She had turned her shoulder to him 
coldly when he had said this, imagining 
herself there with big brown Jose, in his 
gala -dress, home from some journey 
where he had been seeing the wonders 
of the great world, and whence he had 
brought her a simple little trinket that 
she prized more than all the costly pres- 
ents her husband had given her, since 
she found he had deceived her. And 
then she remembered her quick flash of 
recurrent disdain. This cold and sun- 
less hole a love-place for a Spaniard ? 
Her bitter laugh as she contrasted the 
fiery heat of her own skies with this tep- 
id air and pale gray heaven — big brown 
Jose, strong and lusty, with this white- 
faced travesty of Saint Sebastian — had 
startled both her husband and the Cor- 
fields; and she would not tell them why 
she had laughed, nor what her thoughts 
had been. 

But the arbor that she disdained even 
in imagination for a Spaniard’s lov^e-place 
would be good enough for these false 
English reptiles. She must follow them 
and hear what they said. The network 
of petrified serpents, the opposing rocks, 
she must encounter them all. And she 
must take Learn with her. This daugh- 
ter, who was to be her second self, and 
some day perhaps her avenger, must 
know all that she knew, and be able 
to hate from knowledge, not only sym- 
pathy. 

Suddenly it was borne in on her that 



“PEPITA STOLE TO THE ARBOR.” 


Page 65, 











THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM D ENEAS. 


65 


she had been tricked ; that it had been 
the passionate vitality of her own desires 
which had given life to madame’s color- 
less revelations ; that she had been told 
nothing about Spain because the pre- 
tended friend of the queen had noth- 
ing to tell ; and that the whole thing, 
El Corte, Aranjuez, Andalusia, all was a 
cheat, if not wholly a sham. What Mrs. 
Harrowby vaguely felt through her in- 
telligence Pepita divined by instinct. 
Had she been required she could not 
have given a reason for the new faith 
that was in her, but she was sure all the 
same. 

There was no more sleepy blinking in 
the sunlight now for her, no more quiet 
sitting while Mrs. Corfield and Alick 
tried to draw Learn away from her side 
on the plea of showing her the butterflies 
which the latter had collected, but with 
the secret intention on the part of the 
former to lecture her on her dress and 
to advise her on her manners. Rising 
abruptly, she drew Ream’s hand within 
her arm and looked furiously at Alick 
and his mother. “Your voices distract 
me,” she cried roughly. “You are fool- 
ish people, hissing there like geese. Do 
you think I would trust my daughter out 
of my sight with a bad young man and 
his intriguing mother ? Go : you fatigue 
yourselves for nothing, and you fatigue 
me. Come, my heart, let us get rid of 
these creatures and be alone with each 
other.” 

And on this the two moved away to- 
gether, leaving Alick and his mother dis- 
concerted and amazed. 

“ The only charitable thing to say of 
her is that she is mad,” said Mrs. Cor- 
field briskly as she looked after the 
young lithe figure gliding over the grass 
by the side of the large fat woman, whom 
yet her exceeding stoutness had not rob- 
bed of her native undulating Andalusian 
grace, and wondered if Learn, so lean 
and slender now, would ever be as stout 
as her mother ; while Alick, looking af- 
ter her too, wondered only if ever in the 
future he should come to be to Learn 
Dundas as a brother and a friend. 

“ Leama,” ^said her mother as they 
passed into the shadow of the lime trees, 
5 


and were out of hearing cf the rest, “ I 
want you to come with me on the traces 
of that false fiend, that accursed woman, 
who has just gone by with your father. 
I will listen to what they say, and find 
out more than they think for. The saints 
have put it into my head, and I will tie 
a rope round her lying throat.” 

“Yes, mamma,” said Learn trembling. 

How wild her mother looked ! Flush- 
ed, quivering, her eyes bloodshot, her 
nostrils red and distended, her whole 
face breathing fire, her manner fierce, 
she terrified the child, who yet was used 
to her outbreaks. And then this dark, 
dank shrubbery - walk, where the sun 
never penetrated, and which seemed as 
if it led to the Valley of the Shadow 
where sinful souls congregate and are 
tormented, how terrible it all was ! How 
she wished that time would flow, but the 
days not change, and that she could 
go back to the undisturbed life of what 
seemed like so many years ago, when 
her mother slept after her fat gazpacho, 
and she played with her dolls in silence 
at her feet, and knew no desire beyond ! 
And now all was at an end, with the fore- 
shadowing of still greater changes sweep- 
ing on. But she obeyed, as was her wont, 
and the two walked stealthily along the 
path until they came to the back of the 
arbor where Madame de Montfort and 
Sebastian Dundas were sitting, talking 
in low voices together. 

Thrusting Learn a little apart, and lay- 
ing her finger on her lips in token of 
silence, Pepita stole to the arbor, bend- 
ing her ear against a crevice just as Mr. 
Dundas was saying in a tender voice, 
“May I?” and madame answered gen- 
tly, “Yes.” 

The listening woman clenched her 
hands and set her small square teeth 
like a trap. Was it then as she suspect- 
ed ? Had these reptiles gone so far on 
the bad way as this ? Had that painted 
cheat dared to pick up the love she had 
discarded ? .and had her husband reck- 
oned so far without his host as to imag- 
ine she would tamely submit to his find- 
ing in another woman the sympathy and 
affection he could not find in her ? Pe- 
pita held her breath, but registered her 


66 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


vow all the same, and her square teeth 
set themselves more firmly, while her 
nails dug sharply into her palms. 

Then said Mr. Dundas in a soft, al- 
most cooing voice, “It is the greatest 
proof of friendship we can give each 
other, dearest madame — you to gracious- 
ly allow me to remonstrate, I to venture 
to find fault — but I have long had it at 
heart to say it to you. You so good, so 
pure, so superior, how is it that you can 
speak of the Spanish queen as you do ? 
It pains me to hear her name pass your 
lips, so degraded as she is. Bad as all the 
Spanish women are” — and he said “all” 
emphatically, including by intention the 
woman who was the mother of his child 
— “she is perhaps the worst. Yet you 
praise her — you, the very opposite of her 
in everything — you, one of the noblest, 
she, one of the most ignoble of your 
sex!” 

“Do you not see why, dear friend?” 
returned madame with touching gentle- 
ness. “Your unhappy wife is so fierce, 
so excitable, we must find some means 
of keeping her in good-humor, as we 
keep a child quiet with bonbons.” (“ Bri- 
gand!” breathed Pepita, her ear against 
the woodwork.) “ I feel as you do about 
the odious Spanish queen — that she is 
an infamy, a horror ; but what can I do ? 
It is a deception if you will, but a harm- 
less one ; and you know what your wife 
is when she is not amused.” 

“Yes, I know too well,” answered Mr. 
Dundas bitterly. “ I have not lived with 
her for fifteen years not to know the gall- 
ing pains of her hateful yoke.” 

“ Poor fellow !” said madame sympa- 
thetically. “I should not think there 
were many soft places.” 

“Oh, the false traitor! the snake! the 
Judas ! She shall pay for this !” said the 
Spaniard under her breath. 

“ If I can find any other plaything for 
her I will,” continued madame with an 
unmistakable accent of contempt. “But 
you see* how she haunts me — never a 
day free from her,” with a sigh. 

“You are an angel of goodness to suf- 
fer it,” cried Mr. Dundas. 

“ Dog !” muttered Pepita, with a vision 
of her revenge at home. 


“It is for your sake,” said madame 
softly ; and Pepita knew that her hus- 
band took her rival’s hand and kissed it 
for his answer. 

“And coming as she does, haunting 
me every day, every day, I must prevent 
those violent outbreaks for which she is 
famous,” continued madame. “I could 
not allow her to use in my house such 
language as I hear she is in the habit of 
using elsewhere. I should have to take 
very decided measures if she did ; and 
though nothing of this kind would touch 
our friendship, still, I would rather not 
have it to do. So — don’t you see ? — it is 
^simply to avoid the chance of anything 
unpleasant that I have fooled her about 
this wretched woman, this Isabella of 
Spain, whom I despise as much as you 
do.” 

“ I understand you, dear friend, and I 
honor you, ’’♦said Mr. Dundas; “but if 
you could find some other theme how 
glad I should be ! This one is so in- 
tensely distasteful to me. I feel aggrieved 
even that you should have met your hus- 
band at that court.” 

Madame smiled. She did not say that 
this too was an invention to please Mrs. 
Dundas: she simply answered, “And I 
would not willingly displease you.” 

Mr. Dundas gave a heavy sigh. “ What 
‘a fool I have been !” he almost groaned. 

“Ah,” said madame sympathetically, 
“if we could but go back on our lives !” 

“ I would cancel mine — all of it, all !” 
said Mn Dundas, with dangerous fervor. 
Then, sinking his voice, he added, “All 
but my friendship with you, dear friend.” 

“And I would meet you halfway,” said 
madame. 

Pepita heard no more. A thousand 
voices seemed suddenly to break out in 
her head, mingled with the roar of wa- 
ters and the clanging of brazen bells. 
Her brain was on fire, her heart felt like 
a lump of ice, her throat had closed so 
that she could not breathe ; and then a 
shower of sparks, a stream of flame, 
seemed to flash across her eyes as with 
a deep groan she sunk on the ground, 
struck down with the apoplexy of hate 
and revenge. 

What followed was to Learn like a 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNE AS. 


67 


horrible dream where she was bound 
hand and foot and delivered over to be 
tortured of men and demons. She saw 
her father and Madame de Montfort ap- 
pear suddenly from the arbor, and she 
felt madame attempt to draw her away 
from her mother, by whose senseless 
body she had cast herself — she resisting 
fiercely, striking her father’s smooth- 
tongued friend wildly on her mouth as 
she curved over her like some huge black 
snake. Learn thought, gracefully, trying 
to raise her from the ground. Then she 
saw Dr. and Mrs. Corfield standing there, 
and Alick too — Alick, with his ugly, ten- 
der face strangely beautified to her in this 
moment of dream and terror. They too 
came suddenly, she did not know how — 
as if by magic up from the earth or shot 
through the air. 

Dr. Corfield had a small steel blade 
shining between his fingers. She saw 
him strip her mother’s large, soft, olive- 
tinted arm, and then she found herself 
standing apart, facing the river, and sup- 
ported by Alick, whose eyes were full of 
tears and who called her “dear.” After 
which everything was a blank save the 
marble face of her mother, till she found 
herself once more at home and alone 
with the one love of her life, her only 
friend, her sole delight. 

But not for long. Pepita’s ill-starred 
life was nearly over, and her sins with 
her sorrows had come to an end. There 
was no help for her in heaven or on 
earth. The saints would work no miracle 
of healing, and science could not. She 
had to die ; to leave the husband whom 
she had never loved, and who had ceased 
to love her ; to leave her little one, her 
child, her sweet heart, to a father to 
whom she was a stranger and an ene- 
my — to the pains and perils of this cold 
deceitful English life. Her Leama, her 
darling — she must wander through the 
desert as she best could, unaided : guar- 
dian there was none for her, friend there 
was none — no one to help her, no, not 
one. 

It was a bitter moment for the Span- 
iard. Passionate and ignorant, she had 
been but an undesirable kind of mother 
for Learn, teaching the child to hate her 


father — teaching her, indeed, the doc- 
trine of hate all through ; setting her in 
opposition to her surroundings; filling 
her young head with false pride, igno- 
rant prejudices, foolish fancies; stifling 
religion under superstition, and keeping 
her as untaught as useless. Still, she 
loved this child, this little Leama, with 
her whole fierce, fervid heart, and if it 
was not the best kind of motherliness, it 
was at the least the best she had to give. 

It was agony to have to leave her, but 
the moments flew fast, and the hour when 
all would be over was drawing ever near- 
er. Her life was ebbing away, and there 
was no hope of salvation. She might curse 
the Great King whose conquest she was ; 
say incoherently, wildly, that she would 
not die, she would not — blaspheme God 
and the saints, man and the angels ; but 
it had to come. Hour by hour she sank 
lower into the depths of the grave, and 
hour by hour Leam’s fear increased. She 
would have no one with her but Learn : 
she would not see her husband, nor let 
him know her condition. “ We are alone 
in the world, you and I,” she said at in- 
tervals to the child. “You are the only 
one who loves me, and I am the only 
one who loves you. Never forget me, 
Leama. Sweet little heart, love me 
always.” 

“ I will, mamma,” said Learn, not sob- 
bing, not weeping, as another girl might, 
but sitting quite still, looking at her moth- 
er with her large dilated eyes dark with 
terror, and every now and then kissing 
her powerless hand. 

“ Do not forget me, Leama,” said Pe- 
pita with a flash of her old jealous pas- 
sion in her eyes. 

“ No, I will never forget you, mamma. 
I will always love you, and you only,” 
answered Learn solemnly. 

“No one but me — no other mother but 
me,” she said again, faintly yet fiercely. 

“None, mamma. But oh stay with 
me yourself — do not leave me !” cried 
the poor child, trembling. 

“ My heart, my little soul !” said Pepita 
yet more faintly, and tender now, not 
fierce. “ Kiss me, Leama — kiss me, little 
daughter. Never forget me.” 

The girl flung herself on the bed and 


68 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


clasped her slender arms about her 
mother’s neck. Her hair fell down and 
covered the face and shoulders of the 
dying” woman like a mourning veil. Her 
fresh lips pressed themselves against the 
dear face as if they would have kissed 
the beloved back to life by the very force 
of her loving passion. Pepita gave one 
hoarse and shuddering sigh, and Learn 
unconsciously kissed away her last breath. 

When she unclasped her arms the play 
was played out, the goal reached. There 
was no longer a mother with her child, 
only an orphan watching over a figure 
of senseless clay — the figure of a woman 
whose passions were at rest, whose mis- 
takes would be made no more, for the end 
had come and she was dead. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

UNDER 'iHE NEW LAW. 

The death of Mrs. Dundas was the 
unloosing of the feminine activities of 
North Aston. Each lady seemed to 
think that beam’s conversion to English 
habits of life and modes of thought rest- 
ed mainly in her hands, and all rushed 
forward like the fairies at a christening 
to endue her with their counsel and en- 
rich her by their gifts of sage instruction. 

But Learn was her mother’s daughter, 
and no more plastic than that mother 
had been. She wrapped herself in her 
cloak of Spanish pride and reserve, put 
on her impenetrable mask of silence and 
reserve, and would have none of them, 
rejecting their sympathy as the imperti- 
nence of the inferior, and putting their 
counsels behind her as so many sugges- 
tions of Satan. No one saw her weep 
or heard her lament ; and the strongest 
sign of feeling she gave was by getting 
up and walking out of the room when 
the ladies who came to sit and condole 
with her for the loss of her mother want- 
ed to show her where that mother had 
been wrong — which was in everything— 
and where Learn must therefore repudi- 
ate the old and adopt the new. 

Her reserve annoyed them. They said 
it showed hardness rather than affection 
in so young a person, and that it would 


have been more natural had she been 
fluid and expansive, had she cried and 
clung to them, kissed them and said her 
heart was breaking, and who among 
them would be her mother and take care 
of her ? Had she done this each lady 
would have answered “ I,” and all would 
have been her devoted friends till they 
had quarreled with her and among them- 
selves for sole possession and exclusive 
claims. 

“ But Learn was not natural,” they said 
one to the other. ‘‘ How should she be, 
when she wore a high comb and man- 
tilla, never came to church, and spoke 
Spanish more fluently than English ?” 

To these good creatures of kind hearts 
and narrow brains conformity to Eng- 
lish middle-class modes of life was the 
only naturalness worthy of the name, 
and all which was not conformity there- 
with was either false or wrong. 

There was one thing however, which 
all repeated, each in her own terms, and 
which Learn did accept : this w'as, that 
she must not grieve too much, for that 
mamma was not really dead : her body 
only had died, while the soul, the real 
mamma, was in a better world, whence 
she could see her dear little Learn and 
watch over her. So Learn was not to 
cry ; mamma was so much happier where 
she was than she had been on earth it 
would be selfish to wish her back ; and 
it would make her unhappy if she saw 
her little daughter fretting for her. Be- 
sides, it was wicked to fret. It had been 
God’s will that she should go, and Learn 
must be resigned and not repine. 

Most of us know from early years the 
unreal consolations offered by orthodoxy 
to those w^ho grieve for the loss of their 
dearest ; and the familiarity of youth in- 
duces the questioning of maturity. But 
all this was new to Learn, and she ac- 
cepted the first part of it as the absolute 
truth, unsoftened by spiritual explanation 
or modifying paraphrase. Henceforth it 
was the fact that ruled her life — mamma 
was alive in heaven and knew all that 
was going on at home. Thus she had 
another weapon of defence against in- 
novation, and another reason why she 
should maintain intact that tenacious 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM FUND AS. 


69 


loyalty to her mother’s love and teach- 
ing which admitted no rival and as little 
voluntary change.. 

But resolve as she might, Beam’s 
strength had gone from her, and the 
Philistines were upon her. The manner 
of life led with her mother came to an 
end, and her father, acting under the 
collective advice of the ladies, but main- 
ly influenced by madame, took her in 
hand immediately after the funeral, de- 
termined on making her an English girl, 
body and soul, and to wipe away the past 
as though it had never been. 

Not meaning to be harsh, yet harsh all 
the same, he began the war by telling her 
that things were changed now, and that 
she must acknowledge the new regime 
by frankly abandoning her bad habits 
and absurd affectations. He would have 
no more of them, and they must be given 
up. 

“What bad habits ? what affectations, 
papa?’’ asked Learn superbly, thinking 
to carry all before her as her mother had 
hitherto done, and she also, borne along 
in the maternal skirts. 

“Your ridiculous dress, to begin with,’’ 
said Mr. Dundas. “Your hair shall no 
longer be done in that absurd style, but 
simply and plainly, like an English lady’s ; 
and I will have no more mantillas and 
combs. You must wear what I have or- 
dered to be taken to your room instead.’’ 

This was a jaunty little hat made in 
the current mode, and sent from London 
by madame’s orders. 

“ That thing in my room ? I’ll not wear 
it !’’ said Learn with a disdainful gesture. 

“ I think you will,’’ replied her father 
slowly. 

It was on a Sunday morning and in 
the breakfast-room when this conversa- 
tion, which was the initial act of the con- 
test that had to come between them, took 
place — the Sunday after the funeral, on 
which day Mr. Dundas had decided that 
Learn should go to church with him, 
dressed as an English girl should be, and 
with no more of this offensive difference 
of nationality or religion about her. 

And it may as well be said here that 
breakfasting with her father at all was 
an unwelcome novelty to the girl. Dur- 


ing her mother’s lifetime she had had her 
meals with her apart. They had lived on 
garlic and oil, gazpacho and other un- 
English messes, which Mr. Dundas dis- 
dained as much as Pepita disdained roast 
beef and plum pudding, and which they 
had had served up anyhow and at all 
hours, just when wanted. So, partly by 
contrariety of temper and because it an- 
noyed Dundas, partly because of her dis- 
like to fixed times and formal service, 
and in a degree because of the character 
of her food, Pepita had abandoned the 
dining-room and family meals, keeping 
Learn with her as her table companion ; 
hence the child had never known what 
it was to eat with her father, and in her 
heart resented the indignity which she 
held to be included in the innovation. 

She was leaving the room after she had 
delivered herself of her refusal, but her 
father’s voice stopped her. She faced 
him. fixing her eyes on him steadily. 

“How like her mother!’’ he thought, 
meeting her eyes full of that tragic ex- 
pression which seemed wavering between 
tears and wrath, hysterics and Alexan- 
drines. 

“ There is no use in defying me. Learn,” 
said Mr. Dundas hastily. “You have to 
submit to me now ; and — understand me 
— you shall submit. You shall wear the 
dress that has been provided for you, and 
you shall come to church with me to-day.” 

Still Learn did not speak nor remove 
her eyes from their steady gaze on her 
father’s flushing face. But though she 
was as rigid as if cut out of stone, yet her 
attitude and bearing were defying and 
contemptuous, and irritated Mr. Dundas 
almost as much as his wife’s coarse vio- 
lence used to irritate him, while they baf- 
fled him even more. 

“ You shall submit,” he repeated again, 
shifting some plates and knives noisily 
as a mechanical relief to his feelings. 

Then said Learn in Spanish, with a 
certain fiery concentration more expres- 
sive than the most passionate eloquence, 
“ Am I not mamma’s daughter, papa ? 
It is wrong to make me do what she does 
not like.” 

“It is not,” answered Mr. Dundas. 
“Your mother was not a fit guide for 


70 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DONBAS. 


you. She was the worst you could have 
had, and you are to be in better hands 
now. And do not speak to me in that 
cursed jargon, Learn. You are an Eng- 
lish girl, not a Spaniard : speak English, 
then, or do not speak at all. Now go 
and make yourself fit for church. The 
bells are ringing.” 

“Papa,” cried Learn with an imploring 
accent, but one full of pride; “this is 
affronting mamma.” 

“ Don’t talk nonsense : go,” returned 
her father angrily. 

“To the heretic Protestant church in. 
an English hat ? I am a Catholic and 
a Spaniard,” cried Learn haughtily, first 
crossing herself and then making her 
mother’s favorite sign of abhorrence. 

Mr. Dundas took her by the arm, 
somewhat too roughly. “ Hear me once 
for all. Learn,” he said in slow, distinct 
tones. “You are neither a Catholic nor 
a Spaniard : you are a Protestant and 
an English woman. While your mother 
lived I did not interfere with you : you 
were her child, not mine. But now that 
she has gone and 1 am responsible for 
you, I will have you what I wish you to 
be. If you will not obey me quietly you 
shall by force. My mind is made up, 
and you ought to know by now what 
that means. All the people here are 
aware of what I intend to do — bring you 
to church to-day, dressed like one of 
themselves ; if you make a scene and 
have to be taken by force, the shame 
will be on your own head. Nothing 
shall make me waver one inch from the 
line I have marked down. You have the 
choice between the dignity of voluntary 
submission — if that phrase suits your in- 
ordinate pride and vanity — and the dis- 
grace of being publicly made to submit. 
Take your own way. Whichever you 
do take will lead to the same thing in 
the end.” 

Learn, who had listened quietly enough 
while he spoke, now tore his hand with 
contemptuous anger from her arm and 
covered her face. It was a trial to her, 
greater in its way than any she had ever 
encountered. That her father, whom 
she had been taught to despise, to flout, 
to regard as something infinitely beneath 


her mother and herself, should now have 
her in his grasp and be able to force her 
into submission — what an indignity! 
what an insult through her to her moth- 
er ! But she had the strength if also the 
weakness which belongs to pride, and as 
she became convinced that there was no 
help for it, and that she must submit, as 
her father said, she preferred the method 
which brought the least amount of public 
shame with it. Recognizing the fact of 
defeat, she was wise enough not to pro- 
long her struggle, and, after a few mo- 
ments’ contest with herself, she lifted het 
tearless face and said coldly, “ I will obey 
you, papa.” But she held her proud 
head as high as before. 

“You are a good girl,” said her father, 
more kindly than he had yet spoken. 

* “ No,” flashed Learn, “ I am not good : 
it is you who are bad and cruel.” 

“Then I need not thank you? need 
not be pleased with you ?” he returned 
in a half-bantering way. 

“ Pleased with me ? you f' she answer- 
ed, her whole heart of scorn in her voice. 
Shaking her fore finger backward, she 
added, “ I am mamma’s daughter. What 
have I to do with'you, or you with me ?” 

“You will soon see,” returned Mr. 
Dundas angrily. “ Unfortunately for me, 
I am your father, and have to do with a 
very silly and undutiful daughter. Now 
go up stairs and dress, and behave, if you 
can, like a reasonable creature, and not 
like an imbecile, as I sometimes think you 
are. Your absurdities are as fatiguing as 
they are ridiculous.” 

“And yours fatigue me as they did 
mamma,” said Learn as she left the room 
with her head still held high, but crying in 
her heart, “Oh, mamma, why did you 
leave me ? Holy Virgin, why do you 
not protect her and me ?” 

Thus the first contest was got over, and 
that with less difficulty than Mr. Dundas 
had anticipated. For the sentiment un- 
derlying, that might pass for the present : 
what was most valuable at this moment 
was the fact. 

Quiet, undemonstrative, as unmoved 
as if it had been a thing of daily habit, 
Learn walked by her father’s side into 
the church, where her presence, “clothed 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


71 


in her right mind,’* as Adelaide Birkett 
said, created more excitement than if she 
had been a princess at the very least. A 
supernatural creature in human attire, 
the Dunaston ghost itself, could not 
have caused a greater stir in the congre- 
gation than did this young melancholy 
girl as she glided noiselessly after her 
father up the middle aisle, like one in a 
dream rather than awake, but as imper- 
turbable in gesture as she was miserable 
in face. 

Certainly she scandalized the watch- 
ing congregation by not following the 
prescribed attitudes, and by not know- 
ing her place in the Prayer Book, the 
offer of which she at first coldly refused, 
and when her father thrust it angrily into 
her hands, held it on her lap at the same 
opening, and never even feigned to read*. 
She sat all through the service, her mourn- 
ful eyes fixed on the floor, mentally re- 
peating aves and paternosters as exor- 
cisms against the sin in which she was 
engaged ; for was she not taking part in 
the ritual of heretics, hence offending the 
saints and gratifying the Evil One with 
every prayer that was repeated, every 
hymn that was sung? 

When Mr. Birkett mounted the pulpit- 
stairs with his slow and showy step, she 
remembered the time when her mother 
had hanged the cat, crying, “Preach, 
Birkett, preach !” and closed her ears 
against his sermon as if it had been a 
litany of witches. As the military-mind- 
ed rector preached discourses of that dry 
kind which are just so much professional 
obligation worked off with the least ex- 
penditure of mental force possible, per- 
haps she did not lose much. 

The worst of the day’s ordeal was 
when the families congregated under the 
church-porch for the friendly gossip which 
was as much part of the Sunday service 
at North Aston as the Litany or the Col- 
lect for the day. Feeling, as Learn did, 
humiliated and ridiculous, that symbolic 
hat of hers the badge of her degradation 
and the sign of her despair, the eulogistic 
glances and approving words of the la- 
dies were as so many insults to herself 
and her mother’s memory — additional 
drops of the bitterness with which her 


cup w'as filled. Every one said something 
kind, for every one understood the mean- 
ing of her appearance there ; and all 
wanted to make it a kind of public ad- 
mission into their order, a minor office 
of social baptism, wherein she was to 
be greatly caressed and feted, as tame 
elephants caress and cajole the wild 
ones. 

But their kindest words fell dead on 
unresponsive Learn. When Mrs. Birkett, 
dear soul ! said with every good intention, 
“Well, Learn, my dear, what did you 
think of our beautiful service ? Did you 
not like it and feel it go to your heart T' 
Learn answered as her mother might 
have done, “ I did not listen, and what I 
heard was ugly and stupid.” 

When Mrs. Corfield bustled up to her 
and grasped her slender arms in her 
tight little hands, saying, “ I am so glad 
to see you here, Leain, my dear! How 
nice you look jn that hat ! You are 
quite a different creature now, and real- 
ly as.good as any of them,” Learn look- 
ed at her with tragic disgust, then for the 
second time to-day released her arms and 
turned away, saying, “And I am not glad. 
You hurt me.” 

To Mrs. Fairbairn, whose fresh round 
face dimpled all over with smiles as she 
shook hands with her warmly and pant- 
ed cordially, “ How nice this is 1” Learn 
answered coldly, “Why do you laugh ?” 
and stood waiting for her answer with a 
serious simplicity that disconcerted the 
pleasant-tempered woman as she never 
thought she could be disconcerted by a 
child. 

Madame said nothing. She had more 
tact and discrimination than the North 
Astonians, and understood too clearly 
what the girl felt to congratulate her on 
her sorrow. She had it at heart to tame 
Learn, to make her love her, to bind her 
fast with cords of gratitude for a sym- 
pathy she could not find elsewhere. Not 
being a person of fixed ideas or resolute 
principles, she intended to make Learn 
feel that she was her understanding 
friend, comprehending and regretting 
her misfortune. All the same, she chose 
her hats, advised Mr. Dundas to bring 
her to church and make her leave off 


72 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM BUND AS. 


talking Spanish, and urged him to ob- 
literate every trace of the bad past as 
speedily as might be, leaving the way 
clear for the better future which she would 
direct. At the present moment, how- 
ever, she contented herself simply by 
pressing Leam’s hand with that kind 
of secret alfectionateness which is like 
a whisper of love between two people 
who are forced to keep an undemon- 
strative face to the world. 

For which Learn was grateful, in spite 
of herself. It touched her in the midst 
of so many loud-voiced congratulations. 
Had she been any other than Madame 
de Montfort, the girl’s heart would have 
yielded on the spot, but she thought of 
her mother’s persistent dislike, even while 
she had haunted her, and her little hand 
lay limp in the soft grasp which said as 
plainly as words, “ Dear child, I feel with 
you.” 

Alick too forbore to congratulate. No 
one was so glad as he to see his pome- 
granate bud take on itself the habits of 
an English rose ; but if he was glad for 
himself he was grieved for her, enlight- 
ened as he was by his power of compre- 
hension and that odd idealizing habit of 
mind which rounded off all he saw. 

The healing and understanding spirit 
which speaks without words looked out 
from his honest eyes as he met hers, 
searching for a friend, and conscious now 
that she had found what she sought. As 
indifferent to appearances as to persons, 
the girl drew back a few steps till she 
came side by side with him. Then she 
held out her hand, her serious face lifted 
up to his. ‘‘You are good,” she said 
gravely. ‘‘You do not hurt and you do 
not laugh. You may talk to me.” 

On which, turning her back abruptly 
to the rest, and still holding Alick’s hand 
in hers, she walked down the churchyard 
swiftly, saying as she went, ‘‘ Let us get 
away from them. Mamma hated them 
all, and so do 1.” 

‘‘Ah, but we must not hate, senorita,” 
said Alick very gently. ‘‘ It is wrong 
to hate, and just coming out of church, 
too ! God himself is love,” he added 
reverently. 

‘‘ Oh no. He is not,” said Learn. ‘‘ God 


and the saints gave mamma to papa, 
and now they have given me to him and 
taken her away. No, God is not love ; 
or at least,” she added in a plaintive 
voice, turning to Alick with a pathetic 
look of injury and ill-treatment, ‘‘He 
does not love me, though I do not de- 
serve it from Him. I never did Him or 
the saints any harm.” 

What could be said to such an un- 
compromising bit of anthropomorphism 
as this ? Alick’s simple theology was 
scarcely up to the mark against unor- 
thodoxy of such a bold, unusual strain. 
All he could do was to look down on 
her kindly, wish that his mother would 
talk to her, and say in a soothing voice, 
‘‘ Some day, senorita, the dark things 
will be made clear, and you will under- 
stand why you have been afflicted.” 

‘‘All the same, it is cruel,” sighed 
Learn. ‘‘But,” kindling, ‘‘I have not 
said my prayers since mamma died till 
now in that ugly church of yours. I 
wanted them to know that I was angry, 
but I did not want them to think I was 
there contemptuously, ‘‘of my own free- 
will.” 

‘‘Oh, senorita, will you never be got 
to understand the truth ?” cried Alick, 
filled with such infinite pity and tender- 
ness for this erring young soul he felt 
as if he could have turned monk for her 
sake if only he could have set her feet 
free from their misleading fetters. 

‘‘ I do know the truth,” said Learn proud- 
ly. ‘‘ Mamma was a Catholic : she knew 
what was good. It is you bad heretics 
who are wrong.” 

‘‘ No, no, we are right. Oh, how I wish 
you could think so !” pleaded Alick. 

Learn looked at him with a strange 
mixture of sorrow and scorn. ‘‘ I am to 
think you right ?” she said. 

‘‘Yes,” he replied fervently. 

‘‘And mamma wrong?” 

He was silent. 

‘‘And mamma wrong?” she repeated 
solemnly. ‘‘And to tell her that to her 
face, up there in heaven ? And make 
her angry with me, and unhappy ? No,” 
shaking her head, ‘‘ she shall never have 
to complain to the saints that I am differ- 
ent now that 1 need not be afraid of her. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


73 


and when she cannot beat me if I offend 
her. I will do what mamma likes more 
than ever now, because she is not h«re to 
make me. You may hold your tongues. 
You know nothing: mamma knew ev- 
erything. You are all bad but you, and 
you are good, but you are stupid.” 


Alick made no reply ; and Learn, hav- 
ing opened her mind so far, was not dis- 
posed to open it farther, so they walked 
on together in silence, and the families 
at their heels smiled furtively and took 
long jumps to conclusions. 





j-v. 


CHAPTER XIV. 
UNCHANGEABLE. 

T he outposts of conformity carried, 
Learn was driven back on that in- 
ner citadel of self which cannot be taken 
against the will. Here she was safe. Her 
father might command her actions, but 
he could not control her mind : he could 
not turn the current of her thoughts, 
which were ever with mamma, always 
mamma, nor quench either her love for 
that one beloved, or her hate for all the 
rest. To her own soul she was absolute, 
and Sebastian was soon made to feel 
there was a point where his authority 
failed, and whence she defied him suc- 
cessfully. 

Not quarrelsome like her mother, not 
tempestuous in any way, but concen- 
trated, dry and infinitely disdainful, she 
was as impenetrable as Pepita had been, 
and as impossible to influence. Tena- 
cious to the highest point, she was of the 
nature of those creatures who suffer them- 
selves to be hacked to pieces rather than 
lose their hold. Her hold was her loy- 
alty to her mother dead as when living, 
and her determination not to be warped 
in mind from the teaching she had giv- 
en her, whatever her necessity of action 
might be. 

Whether her father was pleased or dis- 
pleased in nowise touched her if she felt 
sure that mamma would have said she 
was right. Twice when he drew her to 
him, and kissed her with a sudden burst 
of feeling, the girl simply stared at him 
with those large eyes of hers, wiped her 
lips vigorously, and wondered why he 
should. It did not seem the right kind 
of thing to do — anyhow, she was sure 
mamma would not have liked it — and a 
flush of mingled shame and anger shot 
like a flame over her pale face as she 
drew herself away with a look of injury 
and offence. He tried this special form 
of paternal kindness, as was said, only 
twice, and then he gave up the attempt. 
74 


But they did not get on together the bet- 
ter for his rebuff. 

If he asked her to walk with him. 
Learn, to whom exercise was as strange 
as kissing, would obey him truly, but 
with the air of a slave hounded to her 
labor or of a victim preparing for her 
sacrifice. She never talked when they 
were out, and she knew nothing — having 
the air, too, of resenting all that was told 
her if it was what her mamma had not 
known, and what she would have con- 
tradicted. She was the most uninterest- 
ing companion in the world to a man 
who liked to be amused with pleasant 
chit-chat and found no pleasure in break- 
ing up fallow ground ; and when she had 
gone perhaps half a mile she would sud- 
denly stand still in the middle of the 
road and say, “ I am tired : I will go 
home,” no matter what his object had 
been, whether Lionnet and madame, or 
the Hill and Josephine Harrowby. 

All this was very unsatisfactory, and 
by degrees her father’s good intentions 
burnt themselves out, and he began to 
leave her to herself as in foregone times; 
which was just what Learn desired. 

The ladies fared no better. When they 
came about her with their advice and ex- 
hortations she listened to them silently, 
stonily, her unvarying answer being,” No, 
I will not do that : mamma would not 
have liked it or more frequently, chang- 
ing the tense, ‘‘Mamma would not like 
it.” 

What could be done with a girl with 
mournful eyes and an impassive manner, 
who looked like the Tragic Muse, and 
quietly put by all that was proposed for 
her good on the plea that her mother 
would have disapproved ? And what 
can you say to a daughter who has real- 
ized the life after death so vividly that 
her mother dead is the same to her as 
her mother living, only separated from 
sight by the gross veil of the flesh ? They 
knew it was not common sense. to take 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS, 


75 


the thing so literally as Learn had done, 
but then spiritual formulas have no com- 
mon sense in them when tested by the 
needs of every-day life ; and so peo- 
ple find out when they meet with those 
uncomfortable logicians called fanatics. 
Respect for filial piety forbade them to 
tell her that this mother, the object of 
her faithful devotion, was little better 
than a savage, coarse of nature, foul of 
speech, and the worst enemy she could 
have had. Respect for the faith which 
has peopled heaven with souls in bliss, 
of whc m all is said and nothing known, 
forbade them to ridicule her vivid real- 
ization ; while that fetish of English cult, 
conventional propriety, urged them to 
teach her that she must despise all she 
had hitherto reverenced, forget all she 
had been taught, and efface the idea of 
the spiritual mother’s identity as a lead- 
ing line of conduct; that is, teach her 
that she must abandon filial fidelity for 
disloyal conformity. It was a difficult po- 
sition, but as this same common sense 
is a mighty power in England, leading 
us to the hypocrisy of saying one thing 
and doing another, none of them meant 
to be beaten by a child’s fanaticism, and 
all kept up the attack, whether they were 
repulsed or not. 

“Poor Sebastian” was more than ever 
the object of feminine pity, the ladies 
wondering what he would do with that 
odd girl in the end, and lamenting the 
dreadful mess he had made of his life 
all through. He used to run distracted- 
ly from house to house, asking each kind 
soul to help him ; though, to be sure, 
madame was his central point, and the 
one to whom he always returned. But 
asking advice from the rest kept him on 
good terms with them, and gave him 
that thing for which he craved more than 
he craved for happiness — the sympathy 
of a small knot of women, who thought 
what a dear fellow he was, and who felt 
their own eyes grow pitiful and tender 
when he lifted up his blue ones, purpled 
and moist with sorrow. 

He went to them all in turn, and all 
did what they could. Mrs. Birkett lent 
the child hideous square-stitched pat- 
terns, and set her up in wools and can- 


vas ; but though Learn despised her in- 
dustry and refused to learn Berlin-work, 
yet, the rector’s wife being gentle and 
sweet-tempered, as indolent people gen- 
erally are, the girl did not stiffen herself 
against her personally. She even got to 
the length of once giving her hand a 
timid little press that meant as much 
as Carry Fairbairn’s strongest epithet of 
endearment. But Learn , and Adelaide 
were no more sympathetic than Adelaide 
and Pepita had been ; and when the rec- 
tor’s pretty daughter used to lay down 
the law for the girl’s guidance in terms 
as hard and fast as mountain-bases, Learn 
simply turned to stone under her manip- 
ulation, and often provoked Adelaide to 
say tartly, when discussing her at the 
Hill, “Well, horrible as Mrs. Dundas 
was, she was better than Learn. At least 
she was alive.” 

“So I suspect you will find her daugh- 
ter when the time comes,” one day an- 
swered Frank Harrowby. “She has not 
such a pair of eyes in her head as to be 
always asleep as she is now. I’ll under- 
take to say she will some day startle you 
all.” 

“ I am sure I hope she will do nothing 
wrong,” said Mrs. Harrowby with a timid 
look. 

On which Frank laughed, and said 
in reply, “Let us suppose it something 
heroic, mother. Perhaps unmask ma- 
dame.” 

“Oh, that madame!” cried Mrs. Har- 
rowby spitefully ; “what a snake she is ! 
Even Josephine is beginning to find her 
out.” 

Frank laughed. “True, Joseph ?” he 
asked, reading between the lines. 

Josephine blushed a little tearfully. “I 
don’t think I like her so much as I did 
at first,” she said as she spied Sebas- 
tian Dundas driving up the avenue, and 
felt sure that madame had not been at 
home, else he would not have come tu 
the Hill. 

Of course he was on one of his usual 
errands, detailing the last new imprac- 
ticability of his unfortunate Learn, and 
beseeching Mrs. Harrowby to give him. 
her assistance and advice. 

The conclave sat in solemn council, 


76 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


and the upshot of their deliberations was 
that Learn should be asked to go to the 
Hill on a visit, when the ladies would do 
what they could, and Josephine especial- 
ly would charge herself with the difficult 
task of attempting her education. 

It was all meant for kindness, but they 
could scarcely have devised a system of 
more torture for the girl. Mrs. Harrow- 
by was a well-meaning woman — none 
more so — but she had that rigidity of 
age to which young people are antipa- 
thetic, and that hardness of propriety 
which cannot tolerate the mistakes of 
ignorance or the errors of excess. She 
would if she could have crushed all the 
inconvenient vitality out of youth ; in- 
deed, she regarded youth as in itself a 
thing slightly improper, and wondered 
greatly at Providence for not growing 
the race mature. Moreover, she was a 
woman who fought with windmills and 
lived with perpetual lions in the way ; 
and her windmills never ceased to turn 
nor her lions to prowl. 

When Learn went to the Hill on her 
visit, Mrs. Harrowby, taking her into her 
own room, gave her a long, well-inten- 
tioned lecture on the need of wary walk- 
ing and the care she ought to take of 
her conduct. Her mind was full of that 
frank linking of hands with Alick Cor- 
field the Sunday before last at church, 
and she had suddenly encountered a lion 
in Leam’s eyes when she had seen her 
fix them on Frank with that earnest, un- 
wavering look of hers, which seemed 
full to the very brim of some tremen- 
dous emotion. It was nothing of the 
kind. She was only trying to remember 
the English name of the stone in his 
scarf-pin. It was a turquoise, and she 
had forgotten it. 

But, as Mrs. Harrowby was a very 
proper woman, to whom spades was a 
word forbidden, she clothed her exhorta- 
tion in such vaguely decorous language 
that the girl, used to her mother’s un- 
compromising speech, did not know what 
she meant. Had she told her plainly 
that she was not to allow young men to 
make love to her. Learn would first have 
asked innocently, “Who is there here 
that should ?’’ and would then have add- 


ed haughtily, “And none but a Span- 
iard ever shall.” 

As it was, Mrs. Harrowby’s periphrases 
went round her central thought without 
touching it, and all the good that Learn 
brought away from the interview was a 
lesson in pronunciation, and the convic- 
tion that when her mother called Mrs. 
Harrowby “ a proud old frog ” or “ a yel- 
low old toad,” as she generally did, she 
was justified. 

This visit of Leam’s to the Hill could 
scarcely be called a success. It was dif- 
ficult to know what to do with a girl who 
sat absolutely idle through the day, with 
a melancholy face like a Grecian mask 
cut in stone, turning a pair of dumb, re- 
proachful eyes from one to the other, like 
a dog inquiring of an enigmatic master 
— a girl who would not talk, and who 
answered any questions that might be 
put to her only in monosyllables ; who 
would not read, nor work, nor play cro- 
quet, nor laugh when others laughed, nor 
take any part whatsoever in the home- 
life ; who always looked on the point of 
bursting into tears or of pleading pas- 
sionately for mercy ; and who could be 
neither caressed nor coerced into any 
sign of life whatsoever. It made Mrs. 
Harrowby so nervous, she said, to see 
her like this she could not sit in the 
same room with her; and Maria, who 
was sharp-tempered, told her plainly one 
day that she made herself disagreeable 
to them all by her sullenness. 

To which Learn, fixing her big eyes 
on the puckered face of her monitress, 
said coldly, “Why do you not send me 
away, then ? I did not ask to come.” 
Whereat Maria was very angry and 
scolded her severely. 

Learn never understood why she was an- 
gry. She had no idea that she was offend- 
ing against good manners by her straight- 
forwardness or her stillness. She was 
just herself, nothing else ; and her mind 
had not yet wakened to the necessity of 
making herself different from what she 
was by nature and habit for the sake of 
others. She was a Spaniard, and they 
were all inferior creatures — English, Prot- 
estants, pigs, in nowise her equals. All 
that they did and were out of her own — 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


77 


I or rather her mother’s — groove was wrong 
and silly, and she despised them for their 
I very knowledge, as your true homebred 
' Turk despises the Giaours who dance 
I with their own feet rather than hire slaves 
i to dance for them. Her whole nature 
was encrusted with the pride and hatred 
I taught by Pepita as a religion, and until 
this should be broken up no good could 
be done with her. 

I A few days settled that fact in Mrs. 
Harrowby’s mind, and in Maria’s and 
Fanny’s, though Josephine was more 
! hopeful, and begged for a fair trial. 
Frank, too, thought she might stay a 
little longer. He found her tragic face 
i amusing and her earnest eyes promising. 
He took some trouble with her, and did 
his best to get up a mild flirtation that 
might stir the stagnant waters ; but Learn 
did not like him. Ugly Alick Corfield 
was far more pleasant to her than this 
jaunty, dapper little man, who would 
talk to her w^hen she wanted to be silent, 
and who never said what she cared to 
hear. So Frank lost his time, and when 
he fairly understood that fact, joined his 
mother in her view of the case, and ad- 
vised the young person’s immediate re- 
moval. 

The only look of pleasure that had 
crossed Leam’s face during the whole of 
this long week was when Mrs. Harrowby 
— quite worn out, as she told her daugh- 
ters — said to her at breakfast, “ Learn, I 
am going to take you home to-day.” 

Then Learn, lifting up her serious eyes, 
smiled faintly and said quietly, ‘‘I am 
glad.” 

‘‘You are not very complimentary, my 
dear child,” said the old lady with a 
satirical laugh. 

‘‘ Nor grateful,” put in Maria crossly. 

‘‘Ought I to be grateful ?” asked Learn, 
looking from one to the other. ‘‘ Why ?” 

‘‘Well, we need not discuss it,” Mrs. 
Harrowby answered with an offended air. 
‘‘If you do not feel what you have said, 
no talking can make you.” 

‘‘I feel that I am glad, and I say that 
I am glad,” repeated Learn in her quiet, 
wooden way. 

‘‘You are either one of the most heart- 
less or one of the most brainless girls I 


ever met with in my life,” said Mrs. Har- 
rowby. ‘‘ It is perfectly dreadful to have 
anything to do with you.” 

‘■‘And you are a cross old woman,” 
answered Learn disdainfully. 

‘‘ Hold your tongue. Learn ! How dare 
you be so impertinent to Mrs. Har- 
rowby? I will tell your father what a 
naughty girl you have been,” said Maria 
sharply, while Josephine quivered into 
tears, Frank laughed, Mrs. Harrowby 
looked injured, and Learn, not letting go 
her parable, said in the same stolid way 
as before to Maria, ‘‘And you are a cross 
old woman too.” 

Mr. Dundas was by no means rejoiced 
to receive his uncongenial daughter re- 
turned so quickly on his hands. He had 
hoped to be rid of her for a month or 
two at the least, but Mrs. Harrowby said 
she was getting no good with them, and 
she had better go home before things 
came to an explosion. Sebastian ought 
to have a governess for her, a staid re- 
spectable person contented with her pro- 
fession — none of your flighty, novel-read- 
ing minxes with aspirations and possi- 
bilities of their own, but a middle-aged 
woman of responsible character and not 
too showy exterior — a widow and not like- 
ly to marry again, and who understood 
discipline and breaking in. 

Meanwhile, as Josephine had taken 
quite a fancy to the child, she might do 
what she could. If Sebastian liked to 
send her to the Hill, say three days a 
week, Josephine would make her study 
if she could, and do her best to open her 
mind. She did not promise much result, 
she said, for Learn was decidedly odd. 
When they were reading to her one of 
Scott’s novels, the girl, who at first had 
been interested, asked suddenly, ‘‘ Is this 
true ?” and when they said, ‘‘No, this is 
not true, it is a novel,” she positively re- 
fused to listen to another word, saying 
proudly, ‘‘ I did not come here to listen 
to lies. Mamma did not tell lies.” On 
another occasion, when they were read- 
ing her a bit of history which they thought 
would be sure to suit her fastidious taste, 
seeing that it was true and what had real- 
ly happened, she put her hands over her 
ears, saying, ‘‘I will not hear of those 


78 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM FUND AS. 


bad men. Mamma did not tell me these 
bad stories.”' 

She was such a strange child, Mrs. 
Harrowby said in self-justification of this 
unlooked-for return : there seemed to be 
no way whatever by which she might be 
touched. They could not make her hap- 
py nor fond of them, though they tried 
so hard to do both. However, they must 
not lose heart. Their only chance lay 
in the beneficent operation of time, when 
she should be older, and for the present 
they must content themselves with sow- 
ing seed for the future harvest. 

But sowing seed is a tedious affair to 
amateur spiritual husbandmen. They 
dislike that long waiting necessary for 
the reaping, and want to plant the grain 
over-night and stack the sheaves next 
morning. Nevertheless, the thing had 
to be done. Team’s spiritual harvest 
was evidently one that would not be 
hurried, and the various husbandmen 
who busied themselves in the matter 
must learn patience and practice it, her 
father and the Harrowbys among the 
number. 


CHAPTER XV. 

LAYING THE LINES. » 

There was no doubt about it: since 
Pepita’s death a secret coolness had 
sprung up between Madame de Mont- 
fort and Josephine Harrowby, which had 
not yet crystallized itself into words nor 
taken any palpable shape of accusation. 
Nevertheless, it was there, and each was 
conscious of the fact, if madame alone 
knew the cause. 

When Team went to stay at the Hill 
this coolness had increased, though to 
Mr. Dundas madame had said how glad 
she was of the change for the dear child : 
it would do her good and bring her out. 
All the same, she had resented the trans- 
lation as a private grievance, and Jo- 
sephine had resented her annoyance as 
unfriendly. Why should they not have 
Team to stay with them if they liked ? 
and why should madame say disagree- 
able little things in that smooth voice of 
hers which gave them such subtle power 


to wound ? Josephine, in no wise high- 
spirited, was yet quietly indignant at 
madame’s late manner, and showed that 
she was by not going so much as for- 
merly to Lionnet, and by speaking little 
when she did go. 

On her side, madame eschewed the 
Hill. The continued stay of Frank was 
reason sufficient for her shrinking from 
close intercourse. She had fathomed 
her peril there, and confessed the en- 
mity which might be so dangerous should 
it ever come to open war. 

But indeed Frank had other things to 
think of — Carry Fairbairn among the 
number — and madame had dropped out 
of his horizon. He did not care to hunt 
her down nor track the secret he felt sure 
she was defending. He was willing she 
should live at North Aston if she liked 
the dull old hole, provided she lived un- 
ostentatiously, put no silly ideas into Jo- 
seph’s head, and did not borrow money 
of his mother. 

All this played well for Mr. Dundas, 
who was thus able to court madame and 
the Harrowbys at the same time, without 
chance of collision or the danger of notes 
compared and conversations repeated. 
Steering among these small social rocks, 
self-created, was just the amusement he 
liked, and he played his double game 
and handled his contemptible little bark 
with wonderful tact and skill. Neverthe- 
less, madame was his true centre. What- 
ever his excursions, he always returned 
to her. 

When Mrs. Harrowby advised a gov- 
erness he went off to Lionnet, ‘‘hot foot,” 
to hear his dear friend’s mind thereon. 
‘‘You know so much more of the world 
than I do, dear madame,” he said in his 
submissive, flattering way. 

She smiled, accepting the compliment. 
‘‘And, knowing it so well, I am perhaps 
rather more cautious than my neigh- 
bors,” she said. ‘‘Caution is not neces- 
sarily suspicion,” she added. ‘‘Young 
Mr. Harrowby is suspicious : I am not 
that.” 

‘‘Oh, Frank is a fool!” cried Mr. Dun- 
das, a little coarsely. ‘‘I am glad you do 
not like him. How should you indeed, 
such a conceited puppy as it is ?” 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


“Yet you are not afraid for sweet 
Learn ?’’ asked madame, with a smile. 
“She is more likely to be caught than 
me.” 

“Learn! Why Learn is a child and 
made of wood,” cried her father. 

“‘Still waters run deep,’ and her mo- 
ther was a Spaniard,” returned madame. 

“Good heavens, madame ! Why, you 
don’t mean to say — ” began Sebastian 
excitedly. 

She laid her hand on his arm. “My 
good friend, I don’t mean to say any- 
thing,” she replied in a quiet voice: “1 
only wish to point out the fact that Learn 
is not a child — Spanish blood at fourteen 
is up to English blood at eighteen ; that 
young Mr. Francis Harrowby is a most 
undesirable young man ; that your daugh- 
ter is your heiress ; and that Mr. Francis 
wants money. This is all ; but I should 
add, that Mrs. Harrowby, who is a shrewd 
old woman and knows her cards, has had 
Learn to the Hill, and is now taking it 
on herself to advise you what to do with 
her. There is no treason in all this,” 
smiling. “Surely, my dear friend, it is 
print which those who run may read.” 

“ I cannot think that Mrs. Harrowby 
has ulterior views,” said Mr. Dundas, 
looking annoyed. To tell the truth, he 
thought she had ulterior views, but not 
touching Learn. 

“Well, we will assume she has not: 
now let us discuss the governess scheme,” 
said madame with perfect tranquillity. 
“A governess for my sweet Learn ? To 
tell you the truth, dear Mr. Dundas, I 
am not fond of governesses for mother- 
less girls.” 

“No? Why ?” he asked. 

She looked down : then she looked up. 
“They are often cruel to the poor little 
dears,” she answered simply ; and Mr. 
Dundas, whose imagination had again 
gone on another track, tapped his boot 
impatiently, his face dark with disap- 
pointment, while hers with difficulty sup- 
pressed a smile. 

“ It can stand over,” he then said after 
a pause. 

“Yes,” answered madame, “it can 
stand over, as you say. There is no 
hurry for a decision to-day or to-morrow ; 


79 

and by waiting events clarify them- 
selves.” 

He looked at her eagerly when she 
said this, but she met his eyes with the 
unexcited gaze characteristic of hers, and 
he could not read even the shadow of a 
thought deeper than her words. It was 
a truism she had uttered, that was all. 

“Meantime, I might perhaps accept 
Josephine’s offer, and in spite of that 
formidable Frank and the old lady’-s de- 
signs let Learn go to the Hill three or 
four times a week, till I can see my way 
to a better arrangement,” then said Mr. 
Dundas in a reflective vein, hoping to 
pique his fair friend into some kind of 
demonstration. 

The faintest possible tinge of color 
broke through the smooth outside of 
the well-arranged face. “Yes, you might 
do that,” she said with perfect equanim- 
ity : “Josephine would like it.” 

“Do you advise it?” His tone was 
cold, his manner offended. 

“No,” said madame sweetly, “I do not 
advise it; unless, indeed,” also with a 
reflective air, “you have motives.” 

Mr. Dundas flamed up. “What mo- 
tives?” he asked, almost in the same 
tone as that to which Pepita had been so 
long accustomed, the habit of disrespect 
from meri*to women being dangerously 
easy to acquire, and as easy to transfer. 

Madame raised her eyes with a certain 
serious rebuke shining in them. How 
pretty she was! how perfectly well-bred! 
How could he have spoken to her so 
roughly ? 

“Unless you intend to marry the dear 
girl,” she said quietly. “ That also would 
suit Mrs. Harrowby quite as well as the 
other; indeed, better.” 

“What can you be thinking of, ma- 
dame ?” cried Mr. Dundas, this time his 
severity affected. In reality, he was 
pleased that she had said this thing. 
It meant either jealousy for her own 
part or the confession of his attractions 
generally. 

“Of what am I thinking? Of what 
Josephine is,” replied the marquise with 
a placid smile. 

“Tut! tut!” he said: “you must be 
dreaming, my sweet friend.” 


8o 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


"Are you ?’’ she returned. 

He bent his head nearer to her. " Some- 
times I do,” he answered in a low voice. 

"It is an unprofitable employment,” 
said madame rising. "Shall I ask Mr. 
Birkett, who is coming up the garden, 
to lecture you on such waste of time ?” 

" How do I know it is waste of time ?” 
answered Sebastian hurriedly. "Dreams 
come true sometimes.” 

She smiled tranquilly. "Yes, you are , 
right, they do, but not often,” she an- 
swered, moving to the door to greet her 
friendly pastor. 

When madame’s visitor left her that 
afternoon she went up stairs into her 
own room, where she first double-locked 
the door, then unlocked a box, whence 
she took a packet carefully wrapped in 
many covers, and labeled on the out- 
side, " In case of my death to be given 
to the name inside.” 

One by one she came to the treasures 
within. These were, first, a large green 
velvet pocket-book, with the letters V. 
and E. combined in a monogram work- 
ed elaborately in gold on the cover. Be- 
neath the monogram was a violet, also 
wrought in gold. The case contained 
about a dozen letters and notes; four 
photographs — one of herself, one of a 
young man, one of both together sitting 
in a friendly attitude, with their hands 
clasped and his arm round her shoulders, 
and the fourth, that of a little baby in 
her arms ; a lock of short curling hair 
of a bright-brown color — a man’s hair, 
not a woman’s ; some visiting-cards, not 
bearing the name of Madame de Mont- 
fort with a coronet at the top, as now, 
but plain Mrs. Harrington ; and a gold 
locket with the same monogram, V. and 
E., on one side in pearls, on the other a 
violet in diamonds ; within were the same 
photographs as before — in one oval the 
man, in the other herself. 

Madame looked at all these treasures 
attentively, read the letters through one 
by one, then laid them in their order 
carefully, methodically, and tied them 
up again in their band of rose-colored 
ribbon. She examined the photographs, 
and smoothed the thick ring of bright- 
brown hair over her supple fingers, a 1 


certain emotion in her well-preserved 
face, but emotion subdued and under 
control — emotion that respected cosmet- 
ics, and was nowhere near to passion. 
Then she returned all in the same order 
as before, wrapped her precious pocket- 
book in many papers, and laid the pack- 
et at the bottom of her trunk, covered 
carefully with some of her reserve force 
of wardrobe. This done, she sat by the 
window meditating. 

From where she sat she could see the 
chimneys of the Hill peering above the 
famous avenue of double chestnuts, ly- 
ing about three miles to the right. Not 
more than half a mile away, near the 
river, was the pretty and less pretentious 
place which Mr. Dundas had named in 
his early lovetime "Andalusia Cottage,” 
but which maps and old itineraries set 
down as " Ford House.” She turned her 
eyes from one to the other, and by the 
look of her she might have been casting 
up a sum. Perhaps she was — a sum of 
chances, and the greater algebraic value 
of a commonplace kind of bird in the 
hand over one handsomer, better por- 
tioned, more sufficing, more desirable, in 
the bush — a sum of times and duration, 
and how long that slender stock of bank- 
notes in her possession would last, and 
when the tradesmen would demand to 
have their accounts settled, and fair words 
would be found unable to stave off rainy 
days; a sum of forces, and how much 
influence the fear of exposure would have 
over a man in good position, the son of 
a model English family respectable to its 
finger-tips, when he should come home 
and have to ^hoose between marriage 
and denunciation — marriage or his secret 
life in London laid bare and his iniqui- 
ties proclaimed to his scandalized rela- 
tions ; a sum of balance and compara- 
tive values — on the one side the love of 
a dishonored past, on the other the se- 
curity of an unloving future. 

The casting- up was apparently in part 
unsatisfactory, for she sighed once or 
twice, as people do who have decided 
for their interest against their inclination ; 
though, to do her justice, she had not 
the weakness to pretend even to herself 
that she was a martyr because she had 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


8i 


elected to forego a splendid possibility 
for a sufficing certainty. Whatever the 
faults of Madame la Marquise de Mont- 
fort might be, they were not those of 
mental debility, and she knew nothing 
of that moral cowardice which calls the 
ugly things of the mind by noble names. 
At this present moment she knew quite 
well what she was doing, and why she 
was doing it. She was deciding on sell- 
ing herself for rest, and on burying the 
flowers of truth and love with a golden 
spade. 

Her reverie ended as the Harrowby 
carriage drew up at her door, this visit 
to madame having hung like a millstone 
round the neck of Mrs. Harrowby’s con- 
science for the last three weeks or so. 
Indeed, her visits to Lionnet were social 
debts never paid willingly by the lady 
of the Hill, and always postponed to the 
last limits of decency. To-day she was 
accompanied by Maria and Josephine as 
shields to protect her when the asperities 
which were so sure to arrive were on 
hand — Maria as her buckler with a spike, 
Josephine as her buffer covered in velvet. 

After the usual greetings, made in the 
graceful manner of suave superiority 
which was madame’s way, and which 
always irritated Mrs. Harrowby, con- 
scious as she was of her own place of 
pride as an English lady, the widow of 
one man of high county standing and 
the mother of another, while this Ma- 
dame la Marquise de Montfort was a 
myth sprung from no one knew where, 
belonging to no one knew whom — an 
enigma whereof no one had the key, 
a fable with a questionable moral — ma- 
dame, turning to Josephine, said blandly, 
“Mr. Dundas was telling me to-day, dear 
girl, of your generous offer to teach our 
poor dear Learn. It was very kind — a 
maternal act truly charitable and much 
needed.” 

Josephine blushed and looked con- 
fused. She wished madame had not 
said that word “maternal.” It struck 
too near the secret centre of her thoughts 
to be pleasant, spoken out broadly like 
this ; and she feared it might enlighten 
her mother, who as yet had not seen Se- 
bastian in this offer of quasi governess- 
6 


hood to Learn — had not connected feel- 
ing for the father with interest in the girl. 

Turning from Josephine to Mrs. Har- 
rowby, madame continued: “And that 
is just what the poor child wants, is it 
not, Mrs. Harrowby? — a mother, such 
as our dear Josephine would make, to 
guide and direct her, and make her fit 
for her future position as the wife of an 
English gentleman — like Mr. Francis, 
for instance ?” 

“ Josephine would make rather a young 
mother for a girl of Leam’s age,” retort- 
ed Mrs. Harrowby tartly. 

Truly, Madame de Montfort had the 
most irritating effect on her. Whatever 
she said annoyed her, and each time 
they met Mrs. Harrowby mentally vow- 
ed should be the last. 

Madame looked at her amiably. “I 
do not think Mr. Dundas considers her 
too young for such a post,” she said with 
her sweetest smile. 

“ Madame how can you say anything 
so gross, so insulting ?” cried Mrs. Har- 
rowby, her pale and puckered face aflame 
with indignation. 

She wished her daughters to marry, 
certainly, but she did not like their 
chances discussed. 

“What have I said?” asked madame 
still amiably, a little bewilderment su- 
peradded. 

“ It is a most unpleasant insinuation,” 
cried Mrs. Harrowby. “We are not used 
to such things at North Aston.” She 
said this as if North Aston was some 
sacred city where, no unclean thing was 
suffered to enter. 

“No, no insinuation at all, dear Mrs. 
Harrowby,” returned madame with 
graceful equanimity, but still holding to 
her point. “ I have not studied life so 
long and under such varied experiences 
not to understand my alphabet. The 
thing is as clear as” — early habit of 
speech prompted “mud,” reflection sub- 
stituted — “daylight: if Mr. Dundas does 
profit by my friend Josephine’s sweet 
offer, it means marriage and nothing 
else. Why,” smiling at Mrs. Harrowby 
in a sisterly, confidential way, “ you and 
I are too old, dear lady, not to under- 
stand that. A child could see it.” 


82 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


“ In which case I should decidedly for- 
bid the whole thing,” Mrs. Harrowby 
answered, pulling irritably at her crape 
and looking for support to her eldest 
daughter, who, after the manner of eld- 
est daughters in general, was gradually 
gaining the ascendency over her mind. 
” It shall never be said that we manoeu- 
vred for Mr. Dundas.” 

Madame raised her eybrows. ‘‘ It 
would be a pity to forbid such a prom- 
ising arrangement,” she said. ‘‘What 
does it signify what people say ? Why 
not let them marry if they like ? You 
must give young people opportunities.” 

‘‘ Madame, do not, pray !” pleaded poor 
Josephine, nearly crying from shame and 
vexation. 

‘‘Don’t what?” answered madame, 
with the look of a French ingenue, 
‘‘Why should I not? I am only plead- 
ing your cause, dear.” 

‘‘Surely, Madame de Montfort forgets 
to whom she is speaking,” said Mrs. 
Harrowby with dignity. 

‘‘No, indeed,” she answered with a 
sweet and pleasant little laugh. ‘‘ I am 
speaking to my friend Josephine, who 
w'ould make one of the best wives in the 
world, and who has, if I am not mistaken, 
a very warm place in her heart for our 
poor widower; while he on his side only 
wants a little wise encouragement to re- 
spond as a gentleman should when he 
wishes to reward a fidelity that is both 
pretty and touching.” 

‘‘Wherever else you may have learnt 
the ways of the matchmaking world, 
pray do not try to give lessons here,” 
cried Miss Harrowby angrily. 

Madame raised her eyebrows for the 
second time. They were well-marked 
eyebrows, many shades darker than her 
hair. ‘‘No?” she answered innocently. 
‘‘ Why do you say that ? What have I 
said wrong ?” 

‘‘ I do not think one of my daughters 
exactly the kind of girl to fall in love 
with a married man, or to offer herself 
as you suggest,” returned Mrs. Harrow- 
by glacially. ‘‘ The mere supposition is 
an insult.” 

‘‘You forget, too, that Mr. Dundas has 
been our friend for life, both before and 


after he was married,” added Maria 
eagerly, conscious on her own side of 
thoughts and wishes once harbored in 
her heart that would scarcely bear trans- 
lation into words. But hers was an old 
dream, begun and cherished long before 
that fatal visit to Spain which had blown 
her castle to the ground and rasped her 
on the bare boards of disappointment. 
Josephine’s was a later and more senti- 
mental matter — a question of pity over- 
flowing its borders and passing into the 
regions akin. 

‘‘ No, indeed, I do not forget your old 
friendship,” madame replied with a cer- 
tain meaning accent. ‘‘ That is just why 
I thought a marriage between Mr. Dun- 
das and my dear Josephine would be so 
pleasant, so suitable.” 

‘‘Don’t, don’t, madame!” again mur- 
mured Josephine. 

‘‘Madame, one word for all : I cannot 
allow this subject to be discussed,” said 
Mrs. Harrowby with all her stiffest dig- 
nity, her iciest displeasure. ‘‘ If I thought 
that you had the smallest ground for your 
assertion I would forbid Mr. Dundas my 
house.” 

‘‘Mamma!” this time pleaded poor 
Josephine, set between two fires and 
scorched cruelly at both. 

‘‘ Surely !” remonstrated madame, rep- 
resenting worldly wisdom. 

‘‘ Mamma would do quite right. In- 
deed, she could do nothing else,” said 
Miss Harrowby. 

Madame looked from one to the oth- 
er with perplexed amazement perfectly 
translated. ‘‘ I am sorry I made any re- 
mark,” she said slowly. ‘‘I fear I have 
done harm.” 

‘‘You have done good,” retorted Mrs. 
Harrowby, still dignified and icy. ‘‘ It 
is always useful to know what others 
think, and to be on one’s guard against 
vulgar mistakes and spiteful misrepre- 
sentations.” 

Madame slightly shrugged her shoul- 
ders. Her dear friends were terribly un- 
reasonable, and she wished them to un- 
derstand that she thought them so. Hus- 
bands were evidently not too plentiful in 
North Aston: why, then, starve a prom- 
ising plant, nip in the bud a potential 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


S3 


bloom ? For her own part, had she been 
the mother of three matured and maiden 
daughters, she would have cultivated Mr. 
Dundas assiduously ; and so she meant 
it to be inferred as she said in her smooth, 
inoffensive voice, “But, dear Mrs. Har- 
rowby, it would surely be such a pleasure 
to you to see one of your dear girls set- 
tled comfortably, and in such a pretty 
house as Andalusia Cottage, too. And 
then Mr. Dundas is such a perfect gen- 
tleman ; and if Learn, sweet child, is pe- 
culiar, she is very interesting. I think it 
would be just delightful.” 

Before Mrs. Harrowby could reply, 
Maria broke in : “ If you are so vastly 
pleased with Mr. Dundas and Andalusia 
Cottage, madame,” she said with bitter- 
ness, “why do you not take it all to your- 
self?” 

“Ah !” said madame, turning her fine 
eyes on the speaker with mournful re- 
buke ; “you are cruel, Miss Harrowby. 
You forget my state.” 

“ Not so cruel as you have been to us,” 
cried Maria. 

“Are any of you widows of late date ?” 
asked madame, still with the same mourn- 
ful rebuke. “In wishing to see one of 
you married to the man of her evident 
affections, the man of her choice, I do 
not bring before you lost happiness. I 
only wish to see you enjoy that state you 
have never known and have so long de- 
sired ?” 

“ How dare you say so long desired ?” 
fired off Maria indignantly. “To hear 
you talk, one would think that Josephine 
was really in love with Mr. Dundas.” 

“Would you, now ?” returned madame 
simply, with a friendly look to Josephine ; 
“and you might make a worse guess,” 
she added. 

Upon which the three ladies rose, Mrs. 
Harrowby saying coldly, “As the con- 
versation has taken such an unpleasant 
turn, all I can do is to end it;” and so, 
without shaking hands, only bowing, they 
stiffly conveyed themselves away, leaving 
madame mistress of the position in that 
she had done that which she had intend- 
ed to do. 

For the upshot of this conversation 
was a cool note from Mrs. Harrowby to 


Sebastian Dundas, withdrawing the offer 
which her daughter Josephine had made 
to help Miss Dundas in her studies, with- 
out reason assigned or regret expressed. 
She was angry at the necessity under 
which she felt of doing this — angry with 
madame. with Josephine, with Sebastian, 
with herself, with everybody concerned, 
and a great many who were not con- 
cerned. She would have been very glad 
indeed had this marriage come about by 
natural and pleasant means, and she had 
even allowed the thought to cross her 
mind in its deepest recesses more than 
once since Pepita died. But when it 
came to a cold, business-like calculation, 
a confessed act of angling as put by ma- 
dame, then all the native pride of the 
English lady woke up in her heart, and 
rather than appear to be planning for 
her daughter’s settlement, she cut the 
ground from under her own feet, and 
made the poor girl unhappy because she 
had not sufficient moral courage to de- 
spise insinuations and defy gossip. 

On her side madame felt safe. She 
knew enough of Mrs. Harrowby to be 
quite sure that she would not give the 
true reason of her sudden co61ness. She 
was not the kind of woman to confess 
to any gentleman that she was afraid 
her daughter was in love with him, and 
that what she had offered in apparent 
friendship meant in reality a bold bid for 
marriage. And even if she should take 
such a decided step so utterly out of her 
own line, madame knew Sebastian Dun- 
das and the strength of the chain she had 
laid on his neck. 

It all came about as she had designed. 
Mr. Dundas rushed off to her in hot 
haste to tell her of this unaccountable 
break in the harmony of his relations 
with the Hill. He was full of it, as a 
grievance demanding the universe for 
an audience, and he exhausted conjec- 
ture as to the cause without coming with- 
in bowshot of the truth. 

Madame listened attentively, sympa- 
thetically, gave her mind to it as a story 
she had not known until now, and busied 
herself in exhausting conjecture side by 
side with him, also keeping out of bow- 
shot of the truth. 


I 


84 THE ATONEMENT 

At last, raising her eyes to him with 
that calm look for which she was famous, 
she said in a quiet voice, “ I tell you what 
it is, my friend. Mrs. Harrowby sees 
things as I saw them, if you remember, 
ancl knows that this scheme of Joseph- 
ine’s making herself Leam’s governess 
means marriage, if you accept it and it 
is carried out. She wants, therefore, to 
bring you to the point, and it is in fact 
a polite way of asking your intentions.” 

“No,” said Mr. Dundas with a fatuous 
smile. 

“Yes,” said madame with a serious 
look. 

He laughed. He was not displeased, 
and he was not surpiised. He had been 
too long accustomed to air his griefs 
against Pepita not to know how sincere 
was the pity awarded to him by the la- 
dies at the Hill. And he knew, too, that 
had not madame come in between, at 
this time he would have been preparing 
the ground for Josephine’s future deco- 
rous installment as the mistress of his 
house and the sharer of his fortune. As 
it was, his hopes were centred here, not 
there, and poor Josephine’s long years 
of faithful friendship went for nothing 
weighed against madame’s improved 
fascinations. 

‘‘At all events,” he said, looking at his 
siren , tenderly, ‘‘ I have no intention of 
asking Miss Josephine to be my wife. 
She is a nice good girl, and I dare say 
would make a man happy enough, but 
she is not the wife for me.” 

‘‘ No,” said madame quietly : ‘‘ I should 
not think she was quite up to your mark. 
When you marry again, you must not 
make a mistake a second time.” 

‘‘ I do not mean to do so,” he answer- 
ed with meaning. 

To which she replied tranquilly, ‘‘ I am 
glad of it.” 


CHAPTER XVI. 
madame’s unjust steward. 

Madame de Montfort’s correspond- 
ence, as a rule, was of the most meagre 
dimensions. She seldom wrote letters, 
and still more rarely received them, but 


OF LEAM DUNDAS, 

for some days after these last interviews 
with the Harrowbys and Mr. Dundas she 
was busy with her pen, and both sent 
and received much curious literature. 

Among the rest came a letter signed 
her ‘‘affectionate brother-in-law, Julius 
de Montfort,” telling her that *their old 
family lawyer and trustee, a Mr. Blanc, 
had proved himself a thorough rogue, 
and had levanted with all the De Mont- 
fort treasure, family plate, diamonds, 
leases, bonds, money — her own dowry 
and her child’s portion included. 

This letter, which was in good English 
enough, was written in a London trades- 
man’s hand on English paper^ but dated 
from the Hotel de Louvre in Paris. It 
was stiffly worded if kindly intentioned, 
and one phrase, ‘‘as per advice,” came 
with a curious twang from the hand 
of a French marquis. It expressed the 
writer’s regret at being the bearer of such 
ill news, and feared that his poor sister- 
in-law would feel the blow hard, coming 
so soon after her great loss. But it coun- 
seled courage and industry, according to 
her known qualities, and advocated ‘‘gov- 
ernessing ” as the most suitable thing for 
her. 

‘‘ With your talents and acquirements, 
my dear Virginie,” it said, “you cannot 
be long in finding some such situation. 
I would, if I were you, look out for some 
good widower with young ladies to drill 
and bring out. That would be more in 
your line, I fancy, than a parcel of young 
ones to teach their alfabet to.” 

‘‘Alphabet” spelt with an f was not 
detected by madame as an error. 

After reading this letter madame he- 
roically anointed her eyes with some pun- 
gent ointment that caused the lids to 
swell and redden and brought tears in 
plentiful abundance ; after which she 
wrote to Mr. Birkett, her sheet-anchor in 
all her storms. 

It was a pretty little note, full of apolo- 
gies for the liberty she was taking, but 
saying would her kind pastor step down 
to her at his earliest convenience ? She 
had just received news that would make 
his presence very comforting and valu- 
able ; also dear Mrs. Birkett, if she cared 
to give the time. She needed advice and 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


S5 


assistance at this moment more than she 
had ever done before. 

It never occurred to her to go up to 
the rectory for this advice and assistance. 
It was not her way to derange herself 
even for her own affairs, putting her 
friends under requisition being more the 
kind of thing to which she was accus- 
tomed. And as I people can generally 
work their world as they set themselves 
to pull the strings, it was the fashion at 
North Aston to attend on Madame de 
Montfort, because she made it evident 
that she did not mean to attend on her- 
self. The ladies sometimes thought her 
unreasonable in sending for their lords 
at all hours, but then women are always 
spiteful to each other, and the gentlemen 
gave no heed, but went. 

“I wonder what is amiss?” said Mr. 
Birkett anxiously as he handed the note 
to his wife, a little wincing at the spelling. 

‘‘She wants money,” said Adelaide 
with a sneer. 

The thought was not quite original. 
She had heard Frank once say, ‘‘The 
touchstone will be if ever she asks for 
money ; and, mark my words, she will 
ask for it.” 

Before madame’s arrival the rector had 
rarely been angry with Adelaide. She 
had managed him with consummate 
skill, and had been the joy of his life, 
if its mistress. Now they were always 
at odds together, and, as Adelaide once 
said to Josephine, her father had never 
spoken a kind word to her since that 
odious woman came. Nevertheless, she 
held to the line she had taken from the 
first, and was for ever provoking his dis- 
pleasure by her enmity to his friend. 

‘‘You are harsh and unwomanly, Ade- 
laide,” he said angrily when she suggest- 
ed the pattern of madame's need, while 
Mrs. Birkett put in more, gently, ‘‘My 
dear, is this quite charitable ?” 

‘‘No, it is only true, and time will 
prove it,” said Adelaide coolly ; whereat 
her father, answering, “If you do not re- 
spect yourself, Adelaide, I must beg you 
to respect my friend and your mother’s,” 
turned his shoulder and ignored her for 
the remainder of the discussion. 

“At all events, I must go down and see 


what the poor dear creature wants,” he 
said fussily when his brush with Adelaide 
was over. 

“ Yes, that is only right, dear,” replied 
Mrs. Birkett, good, easy soul. “ Give her 
my love, poor thing ! and say I am too 
busy to go out this morning” — she meant 
she was too lazy — “ but tell her td send 
up the baby for a few hours. It may be 
a relief to have the little one taken off 
her hands to-day.” 

“Yes, I will, my dear,” said the rector, 
the softened tones of his voice thanking 
her for her sympathy. For indeed her 
conduct to madame had made him love 
her more than he had ever loved her be- 
fore ; it was such a sweet contrast, he 
used to say, to the average English- 
woman’s jealous exclusiveness, making 
marriage such bondage and a husband 
such a mere slave as she does. 

“ If you are going to have that odious 
baby here, mamma, I will go to the Hill,” 
said Adelaide in her coldest manner, 
meaning her mother to give way, as once 
she would have done. 

But Mrs. Birkett had no thought of 
giving way. She wanted the baby to 
play with, and she did not regret her 
daughter’s absence ; so she simply said, 
“Yes, do, dear, it will amuse you and 
her voice showed her relief. “For real- 
ly,” as she afterward complained to her 
husband, “that dear girl’s temper grows 
worse day by day, and she makes me 
quite unhappy with her dislikes and her 
fancies. She cannot be simple and easy, 
and take things as they come, but is al- 
ways looking for mysteries and -finding 
faults no one else sees. As for poor dear 
Madame de Montfort, she hates her so 
unreasonably she even dislikes that sweet 
child because of her.” 

To which the rector answered in an 
angry tone, “She is certainly strangely 
prejudiced against madame. I have 
never seen her so unamiable before, and 
I cannot understand it now. But I will 
not allow her to treat the poor creature 
with rudeness. She and I will quarrel 
if she does.” 

Leaving his wife and Adelaide, how- 
ever, to settle their present differences 
as they best could, the rector went off to 


86 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


his fair friend to hear what news she had 
for him, and to give her his best advice 
thereon. 

He was struck by her air as he enter- 
ed. Subdued and evidently penetrated 
by sorrow, those red and swollen lids 
evidences of some severe affliction, she 
was yet so noble, so self-sustained, so 
grandly calm and gracious in her 
strength, it seemed to him he had nev- 
er seen her so beautiful, so morally su- 
perior to the rest of womankind. She 
gave him the impression of some stately 
priestess on whom a mortal hurt has 
fallen, but who, remembering always 
that she is a priestess, one consecrated 
to the noble life and the manifestation 
of strength and grace, disdains the weak 
lamentation and childish outcry of mean- 
er women. 

“Something terrible has happened, my 
dear friend ?“ said the rector, holding her 
hand in both of his and speaking with 
sincere emotion. 

“Yes,” she said with a patient smile, 
“something terrible, indeed. But sit 
down, dear Mr. Birkett. I need not fa- 
tigue you in body as well as in mind.” 
Here she smiled again — that sad sweet 
smile of hers which was more pathetic 
than the tears of other women. “ I am 
sure I must have tired you by now with 
all my trouble and disasters.” 

“Not at all, not at all ! Don’t say that,” 
repeated the rector. “ I am so sorry that 
you have these heavy crosses to bear.” 

“ This is second only to the worst of 
all — that terrible loss I can never get 
over,” said madame. 

V, “Ah! I am sorry,” he said. “What 
is it?” 

“Briefly this — I am ruined!” said ma- 
dame, crossing her hands on her lap. 

The rector gave a little gasp. He re- 
membered Adelaide’s words : was it pos- 
sible they were true ? 

“ Read this, my friend, and then you 
will know as much as I can tell you,” 
continued madame, who had seen his 
momentary look of terror. 

She put into his hands the letter signed 
Julius de Montfort, written as an English 
tradesman would have written it, on Bath 
post, but dated from Paris. “That is 


from my brother-in-law,” she said; “and 
now you know all.” 

“Villain !” cried the rector as he read, 
madame’s bright eyes watching him 
keenly the while. The sight of the letter 
banished his suspicions, if indeed that 
passing terror could be called suspicion 
at all : he trusted madame too loyally to 
imagine her capable of a planned decep- 
tion. Had she asked him outright for a 
loan, Adelaide might have been right, 
but this was quite different, and this car- 
ried its own proof with it. And when 
he said “Villain!” so energetically, and 
struck the letter angrily with his hand, 
she drew a deep breath and uncrossed 
the taper fingers so closely entwined on 
her lap. She knew now that she was 
safe. 

“What shall I do?” she asked, when 
Mr. Birkett had read the letter for the 
. second time. “ I see nothing before me 
but to follow my brother’s advice and 
make myself a governess. May I come 
to you for a character?” with touching 
cheerfulness. 

The rector could not answer for a mo- 
ment. His clerical tie had suddenly be- 
come tight about his throat. “Surely,” 
he said at last, with an effort, “ if such 
a painful necessity exists you can com- 
mand me.” 

“ Thanks, dear friend ! I knew I could 
count on you,” replied Madame de Mont- 
fort gratefully. “ But, alas ! what can I 
do about my child ? It would break my 
heart to be separated from her, and who 
will take a baby of a year old with a 
governess ?” 

“My whfe would take charge of the 
child for a while until you had looked 
about you,” began the rector ; and then 
he stopped, a little doubtfully. 

He did not object to the occasional 
presence of the baby at the rectory. It 
pleased his wife, and was not an exor- 
bitant price to pay for the pleasure of 
madame’s society. But a baby en per- 
manence, and no madame at hand as 
compensation ! He hesitated visibly, 
and the cordiality dropped out of his 
voice. 

“Ah !” said madame with feeling, “you 
are not a mother, my friend. Do you 



“‘VILLAIN!’ CRIED THE RECTOR.’’ 


Page 86. 





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V. i 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DLNDAS. 


87 


think I could let my sweet one go from 
me ?— not even to such a second self as 
dearest Mrs. Birkett.” 

“The only thing will be, then, to find 
a situation as daily governess, where you 
can keep your own house,” said the rec- 
tor, a pang passing through him as he 
thought of Sebastian Dundas — the very 
thing for her lying at her gate. 

“So I think and feel,” returned ma- 
dame. “ But where to find this phoenix 
of a widower with young ladies to edu- 
cate and introduce ?” 

She looked into his face, and he shift- 
ed his eyes uneasily, “ I do not know,” 
he said. 

“Nor I,” she sighed. Looking round 
her room, she added, “It is a pity to have 
to leave it all when I have made my little 
place so pretty.” 

There was a silence. 

“I am a true woman,” she continued 
softly. “ I care for my house and home ; 
and now that I have got used to my life 
at Lionnet, and have made such good 
friends here, I do not like the idea of 
leaving and turning out into the bare, 
bleak world beyond.” 

Her eyes were mournful, her voice full 
of sadness. The rector felt pushed back 
on his magnanimity. It cost him some 
effort : nevertheless, he knew that as a 
gentleman he must make it. Between 
losing her altogether, while letting her 
confront who knows what dangers out 
in the perilous world beyond, and open- 
ing a door for that fellow Dundas, his 
conscience forbade him to hesitate. He 
was a small -headed man truly, proud 
and pumpkin-like, but he was a gentle- 
man ; and his inherited instincts held 
him straight if certain other of his nat- 
ural qualities would have driven him 
astray. 

“There is Mr. Dundas,'* he then said 
a little stiffly. 

Madame’s tranquil face gave no sign. 
“Learn ?” she said interrogatively. 

“Yes,” replied the rector. 

She shook her head. “A task, I fear, 
beyond my strength,” she answered. “I 
should not like to try and fail.” 

“You would not fail,” cried the rector, 
as her champion against herself. 


She smiled. “You are a partial judge,” 
she answered. “You rate me too high.” 

“ Could I ?” he answered almost ten- 
derly. 

He was so grateful to her that she had 
not flown at his suggestion ! Then she 
had no feeling for Sebastian ? and hav- 
ing no feeling there was no danger. 

The rector did not like contradiction. 
Having offered the suggestion, he stuck 
to it. She must be Leam’s instructress : 
on all the wide face of the earth this was 
the only thing she could do or ought to 
do, and he bent the whole force of his 
mind and will to force her to accept his 
suggestion as a religious obligation. It 
cost him some time and trouble to make 
her see this matter as her duty — her duty 
to herself and her child, and, taking lofty 
ground, poor motherless, desolate Learn 
as well ; but he gradually made way and 
gained on her reluctance. 

She was open to conviction, as indeed 
she always was, being one of those fine 
reasonable women who allow the mas- 
culine intellect its due weight in their 
deliberations, and are pretty sure to show 
their superiority by yielding to it at last. 
But she yielded only slowly and by de- 
grees. It was not the thing she wanted, 
she said — not what she had thought of 
in any way. She was afraid of the task, 
and she was not quite sure that Mr. 
Dundas would like it. 

But when she said this the rector 
^ snorted like a war-horse, and answered 
angrily, “Not like it Why, how could 
that fellow Dundas ever look for such a 
blessing ? It is more than he deserves, 
a thousandfold.” 

Then madame threw up her hands, 
smiling. “I yield! I yield!” she cried. 
“ I will see Mr. Dundas, and tell him 
that it is at your sanction and desire, in- 
deed by your express suggestion, that I 
offer myself to him as Leam’s governess, 
and if he thinks my doing so is a free- 
dom, he is to talk to you about it.” 

To which the rector answered, “Yes, 
do so : it is the best way of putting it, 
and I am glad to be your shield and 
buckler in this matter.” 

“You have been my shield and buck- 
1 ler all through,” said madame prettily. 


88 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM FUND AS. 


“ But for you I should never have been 
here at alL” 

When the rector left, bearing a mes- 
sage to Mr. Dundas from madaine, ask- 
ing him to come and see her, and in- 
tending for his own part to suggest the 
scheme he had just been discussing to 
save her the awkwardness of doing so, 
madame flung herself into an easy-chair 
and, covering her face, laughed aloud. 
It all seemed so droll to her, such sim- 
plicity, such blindness, such childish 
faith. She wondered where a man like 
Mr. Birkett could have packed away the 
worldly knowledge he must have gained 
in his sixty years’ passage through life 
to be so easily deceived as he was by 
her. 

“ I always thought it,” she said to her- 
self, still laughing : ” men are the vain- 
est creatures on the face of the earth. 
Talk of women ! The weakest of us all is 
not so soft as a man if taken in the right 
way, flattered as he likes to be flattered, 
and treated as something infinitely supe- 
rior, not only to poor little us — that is of 
course — but to every other man. These 
two dear, stupid school-boys of mine, I 
govern them both with lollipops — simply 
flatter and cajole, and have them both 
at my feet. If I did not know the world 
and men so well, I should say I was one 
of the cleverest women out — and, for the 
matter of that, I am, pretty well — but it 
is not that so much as that they are the 
biggest fools. How easy it has all been ! 
and my unnecessary terrors !” 

On which she laughed again ; but, re- 
membering that Mr. Dundas was to be 
here soon, she composed her face to the 
proper nobly sad expression she wished 
it to wear, and sat waiting for his advent, 
knitting a baby’s sock. 

Had Madame de Montfort been a 
queen to whom Sebastian Dundas was 
kneeling while pleading for her grace, 
he could not have thrown more respect, 
more homage, into his words and man- 
ner than when he came now to Lionnet 
to beseech this unknown tenant of his to 
live here, in his house, rent-free, and to 
accept a handsome salary for teaching 
his daughter doubtful orthography and 
defective syntax. He forestalled all she 


wished to say. The rector had told him 
enough — quite as much as it was neces- 
sary he should know, he said — and now 
the thing must be considered settled. If 
one steward had proved himself unjust, 
others would be found faithful, and the 
future must atone for the past. So long 
as he lived, he said with tears in his eyes 
and an almost boyish passion of devo- 
tion in his face, she should never want a 
friend, and if she wished to make him 
happy she must put him to the test and 
make him of use to her. 

For a moment madame felt ashamed 
of the pitiful cheat she was enacting. 
Contrasted with all this earnestness and 
truth, what a heartless sham she was ! 
Not that she suffered herself to be turned 
from her main point by remorse or shame. 
She was fighting for dear life, and she 
meant when she had got what she want- 
ed to make no bad use of it. On the 
contrary, she would be a blessing to them 
all — the light of his days and the tender 
guardian of his child. The end justified 
the means, and if she had to gain that 
end by crooked means, the fault lay with 
society, which will not bear the truth, not 
with her because she dare not tell it. 

So she reasoned and sophisticated, and 
soon talked to sleep that starved, som- 
nolent thing she called her conscience, 
and made herself believe that she was 
doing right, eminently right, by deceiv- 
ing Sebastian Dundas to his happiness 
and Beam’s gain, and by making the 
rector her stalking-horse for the sake of 
the respectabilities involved. She had 
her part to play, and she played it well. 
Indeed, she did most things well, clever 
as she was. 

'She accepted the tone her landlord 
took as the homage due to her woman- 
hood in the first place, to her rank as 
Madame de Montfort in the second. She 
confessed her indebtedness frankly, but 
in a grand, almost regal manner — her 
very confession itself a grace — and she 
agreed to his terms with the quiet dignity 
of one who was giving honor and receiv- 
ing right. She spoke of her future influ- 
ence over Learn without vulgar boasting, 
but with no affectation of undue mod- 
esty — seriously, in a fine, almost mater- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


89 


nal spirit, as one knowing her full value 
and what she could do for others ; and 
she let it be seen that she held that in^ 
fluence high and not overpaid at the 
price. 

So thought Mr. Dundas, and so he said 
effusively ; to which she answered grave- 
ly, “And perhaps you are right. There 
are certain things which money cannot 
buy or pay for.” 

The interview was a decided success 
all round. Not the faintest ray of light 
shot athwart the pleasant darkness in 
which the landlord of Lionnet was liv- 
ing : not the smallest slip in her perilous 
path betrayed the true moral whereabouts 
of madame. The one shut his eyes and 
allowed himself to be hoodwinked with a 
docility partly contemptible, partly touch- 
ing: the other fastened on the blind with 
no uncertain hand, and spurned Truth 
as a slave behind her. The end each 
had in view was accomplished. Sebas- 
tian Dundas had secured the right of 
closer daily intercourse with madame : 
madame had secured her present main- 
tenance for the one part, and her future 
marriage with her landlord for the other ; 
the last falling so naturally, coming so 
much as of course from all that had 
gone before, that the place would accept 
it quietly, and not be stirred into an in- 
convenient excitement. For excitement 
might lead to questioning, and question- 
ing might entail answers. Learn, at the 
worst, would take no harm from what it 
pleased Madame la Marquise de Mont- 
fort to call her views on education. If 
the girl was taught only how to hold her 
knife and fork properly, it would be so 
much to the good; and madame, though 
herself substantially uneducated, was by 
many degrees Leam’s superior. Malice 
itself could not find a loophole whence 
to shoot its poisoned shafts, and the va- 
rious parts of the puzzle fitted to perfec- 
tion. But the Harrowbys and Adelaide 
Birkett laughed significantly when they 
heard of the unjust steward and the sub- 
sequent arrangement, and Josephine had 
red eyes for several days after. 

She got a little consolation from Ade- 
laide’s merciless suggestions as to the 
real state and condition of this strange 


woman. She had neither the wit nor 
the courage to think sharp things of her- 
self, but she was pleased at her friend’s 
bold cleverness ; and the intimacy be- 
tween the two, which had slackened dur- 
ing these late months — indeed ever since 
madame’s advent — was knit up into more 
than its former closeness. Josephine had 
her griefs to avenge, and Adelaide’s sar- 
castic tongue did this work for her; while 
to Adelaide herself there was always 
Edgar in the background, and the day, 
when he must return. And it was this 
fact of Edgar’s return that made her hate 
madame so bitterly on the one hand, for 
fear of her undeniable sirenhood, and 
hold by the elderly sisters so closely on 
the other, for hope of the result of her 
intimacy. For indeed the Hill was a 
splendid property, and Edgar was not 
unpersonable. 

So there was reason enough why the 
two should be continually together again, 
and why madame should smile to her- 
self at the harmlessness of their revenge. 
She had the substance safe, and could 
well afford them the shadow as their 
target. It was like fighting with a cloud 
to try conclusions wdth madame. She 
never showed when she was hit. Her 
smile was just as sweet, her manner just 
as even, her speech and greeting just as 
smooth and genial as before. She be- 
trayed no consciousness of cause, no 
perception of results. No coolness could 
dull her, impertinent looks and smiles 
fell dead, and not the most stinging sar- 
casm could irritate her to sharp reply. 
She caught all their spears on her shield, 
and her shield was impenetrable. Thus 
the unspoken feud burnt slowly on — the 
girls watchful and inimical, but madame 
determined not to give the enemy cause 
to rejoice by any imprudence on her side. 
Even Frank was forced to admit that 
she bore herself with consummate skill, 
and that she was the cleverest woman 
he knew. 

“Too clever to be good,” said Mrs. 
Harrowby, true to her colorless code of 
feminine negation ; and her daughters 
echoed the sentiment. 

Meanwhile, Learn underwent a daily 
torture, the effect of which was to harden 


90 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


her more and more to the world outside, 
while driving her deeper into that recess 
where was her stronghold. She hated 
her lessons, not because they were les- 
sons, but because they were things mam- 
ma had not taught her, and would have 
laughed to scorn had she heard of. It 
seemed to her an injury to mamma that 
she should learn all these funny things 
about places and people, the stars and 
the animals, that madame read to her 
from ugly little books, and that mamma 
had never known. 

But what could she do ? It was to no 
good that she sometimes ran away and 
hid for a whole day in one special part 
of Steel’s Wood, braving the unknown 
perils of wild beasts and armed banditti 
to be found therein, if thereby she might 
escape madame. She thought she would 
rather run the danger of being devoured 
by the wolves and lions which she had 
not a doubt made their home in the dark 
parts of the wood, or of being carried 
off by the brigands who lived in the 
caves, than go to madame to feel that 
her mother was being insulted when un- 
able to avenge herself, and that she, her 
little Learn, her own sweet heart, had 
joined hands in the blow. 

Still, running away was of no avail. 
To escape one day out of seven or eight 
might be a gain of so many hours, but 
the permanent arrangement held fast. 
That went on whether she braved the 
perils of the wild beasts and armed ban- 
ditti or not ; and the only result of her 
absence to day was to be taken person- 
ally in deep disgrace by her father to- 
morrow, scolded all the way there, and 
received by madame with maddening 
friendliness at the end. 

Learn thought she could have borne 
it better had madame been cold and se- 
vere rather than so uniformly caressing 


and amiable. 'Had she rated her, or 
even beaten her, as her mother used to 
do, she would have been less reluctant, 
because she would have had something 
tangible to go on. As it was, she too 
felt as if beating herself against a cloud, 
and the plentiful outpour of honey in ex- 
change for her own gall sickened her. 
That pleasant smile, those endearing 
words, that inexhaustible patience, re- 
volted the girl, who saw in her smooth- 
faced “governess” only the woman 
whom her mother had distrusted and 
disliked. For herself personally, with- 
out those haunting reminiscences, she 
would have liked madame well enough ; 
but now it would be unfaithful to mam- 
ma, and Learn could not be that. Liv- 
ing as she did in the one ever-active 
thought of her mother’s unseen presence 
and continued existence, the influence 
of the past was never weakened, and 
Leam’s heart clung to the mother unseen 
as her little arms used to cling round 
her in the days of her bodily existence. 
When the ladies of North Aston took it 
in hand to teach this young savage faith 
in the life after death, they did not think 
they were opening such a crooked door 
as this. 

Thus the relations between Madame 
la Marquise de Montfort and her^pupil 
were not exactly what might be termed 
of ideal harmoniousness, but madame 
never confessed her failure. On the con- 
trary, she always spoke of Learn as a 
most fascinating child, charming to teach 
and interesting to study, and as improv- 
ing daily under her care. 

And when the neighbors said dubious- 
ly, “We do not see the improvement,” 
she only smiled more sweetly than usual 
as she answered with her serene and no- 
ble air, “ But I am conscious of it.” 


-V. 


CHAPTER XVII. 

WHAT MUST COME. 

I F Madame de Montfort could not 
teach Learn some of the things gen- 
erally considered essential to the educa- 
tion of a gentlewoman, if her orthography 
was disorderly, her grammar shaky, her 
knowledge of geography, history and 
language best expressed by x, and her 
moral perceptions never clear and sel- 
dom straight, she was yet far in advance 
of a girl whose training in all things was 
so infinitely below even her own dwarf- 
ed standard. Madame could read with 
native grace and commendable fluency, 
making nimble leapfrogs over the heads 
of the exceptionally hard passages, but 
Learn had to spell every third word, and 
then she made a mess of it. Madame 
did know that eight and seven are fif- 
teen, but Learn could not get beyond five 
and five are ten and one over makes 
eleven. If madame thought deception 
the indispensable condition of pleasant 
companionship, and lies the current coin 
of good society — in which she certainly 
sided with the majority of believing Chris- 
tians — Learn would be none the worse 
for a little softening of that crude out- 
speaking of hers, which was less sincer- 
ity than the hardness of youthful igno- 
rance and the insolence of false pride. 
If madame was only lacquer, and not 
clear gold all through. Learn had not the 
grace of even the thinnest layer of var- 
nish, and might well take lessons in the 
religion of appearances and that thing 
which we call “ manner.” Madame did 
know at least how to bear herself with 
the seeming of a lady, and could say her 
shibboleth as it ought to be said. Thus, 
she ate with delicacy and held her knife 
nicely poised and balanced, but Learn 
grasped hers like a whanger, and cut off 
pieces of meat anyhow, which as often as 
not she took from the point. Mamma 
had eaten with her knife grasped also like 
a whanger, and why might not she ? she 


said when madame remonstrated and 
gave her a lecture on the aesthetics of 
the table. And why should she not make 
her bread her plate, and hold both bread 
and meat in her hand if she liked ? Why 
was she to wipe her lips when she drank ? 
and why, traveling farther afield, was 
she to speak when she was spoken to 
if she would rather be silent ? Why get 
up from her chair when ladies like Mrs. 
Harrowby and Mrs. Birkett came into 
the room ? They did not get up from 
their chairs when she went into their 
rooms, and mamma never did. And why 
might she not say what she thought and 
show what she disliked? Mamma said 
what she thought and showed what she 
disliked, and mamma’s rule was her law. 

All these objections madame had to 
combat, and all these things to teach, and 
many more besides. And as Learn was 
young, and as even the hardest youth 
is unconsciously plastic because uncon- 
sciously imitative, the suave instructress 
did really make some impression ; so that 
when she assured the incredulous neigh- 
borhood of Leam’s improvement she had 
more solid data than always underlaid 
her words, and was partly justified in her 
assertion. 

Religion, too, was another point on 
which the forces of new and old met in 
collision. Madame was of course what 
is meant by the word “religious.” Like 
all persons trading on falsehood and liv- 
ing in deception, her orthodoxy was un- 
doubted, and the most rigid investigation 
could not have discovered an unsound 
spot anywhere. She would as soon have 
thought of questioning her own existence 
as of doubting the literal exactness of the 
first chapter of Genesis, and she thought 
science an awfully wicked thing because 
it went to disprove the story (f tb^ six 
days. She firmly believed in the per- 
sonality of Satan and material fires for 
wicked souls ; and the sweet way in 
which she lamented the probable paucity 

91 


92 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNE AS. 


of the saved was extremely edifying, not 
to say touching. This childlike accept- 
ance, this faithful orthodoxy, was one of 
the things for which the rector liked her 
so well. He had a profound contempt 
for science and skepticism together ; and 
an unbeliever, even if learned in the stars 
and old bones, ranked with him as a 
knave or a fool, and sometimes both. 
His pet joke, which was not original, was 
that there was only one letter of differ- 
ence between septic and skeptic, and of 
the two the skeptic was the more un- 
savory. 

Being then pious, madame had hung 
about her walls short texts in fancy let- 
tering, with a great deal of scroll-work 
in gold and carmine to make them look 
pretty. When she came into possession 
of Beam’s mind, she was shocked at her 
ignorance of all the sayings that were so 
familiar to herself and other persons of 
respectability. Learn knew nothing but 
a few barbarous prayers to saints, used 
more after the fashion of charms than 
anything else, the ave and the paternoster 
said incorrectly and not understood when 
said. Wherefore madame caused to be 
illuminated some texts for her room too, 
as lessons always before her eyes, and 
counter-charms to those heathenish in- 
vocations in which the child put her 
sole faith and trust of salvation. And 
among other things she gave her the 
Ten Commandments, very charmingly 
done. Round each commandment were 
pictures, emblems, symbolic flowers, all 
enclosed in fancy scroll-w^ork of an elab- 
orate kind. Really, it was a very cred- 
itable piece of bastard art, and Mr. Dun- 
das was moved almost to tears by it. 
Madame did it herself— so she said with 
a tender little smile — as her pleasant sur- 
prise for poor dear Learn on her fifteenth 
birthday. And Learn was so far tamed 
in that she suffered the Tables to be hung 
up in her bedroom, and even found pleas- 
ure in looking at them. The pictures of 
Ruth and Naomi; of the thief running 
away with the money-bags ; of a woman 
lying prostrate, with long hair, and a 
broken lily at her side ; of a murdered 
man prone in the snow, and a frightened- 
looking bravo, half covering his face in 


his cloak, fleeing away in the darkness, 
with a bowl marked “ poison ” and a dag- 
ger dripping with blood in the margin, — 
all these pictures, which stood against 
the commandments they illustrated, fas- 
cinated her greatly. The colors and the 
gilding, the flowers and the emblems, 
pleased her, and she took the texts sand- 
wiched between as the jalap in the jam. 
At first she thought it impious to have 
them there at all, because they were in 
the Bible, and mamma used to say that 
good Christians never read the Bible. It 
was a holy book which only priests might 
use, and when those pigs of Protestants 
looked into it and read it, just as they 
would read the newspaper, they pro- 
faned it. But by force of habit she rec- 
onciled herself to the profanity, and by 
frequent looking at the art got the litera- 
ture into her head. And when it was 
there she did not find anything in it to 
be afraid of or to condemn as too mys- 
teriously holy for her knowledge. All 
of which was so much to the good ; and 
Mr. Dundas had no words strong enough 
whereby to express his gratitude to the 
fair woman who had saved his child from 
destruction by giving her the Ten Com- 
mandments made pretty by adjuncts of 
bastard art. 

But had it not been for Alick Corfield, 
Madame la Marquise de Montfort would 
not have made quite so much way. Al- 
ick and Learn used to meet in Steel’s 
Wood ; and when Learn carried her per- 
plexities to Alick, and Alick told her that 
she ought to yield and gave her the rea- 
sons why, after first fiercely combating 
him, telling him he was stupid, wicked, 
unkind, she always ended by promising 
to obey ; and when Learn promised the 
things agreed to might be considered 
done. In point of fact, then, it was 
Alick who was really moulding her, in 
excess of that unconscious plasticity and 
imitation already spoken of. But this 
was one of the things which the world 
did not know, and where judgment went 
awry in consequence. 

Of course the neighborhood saw what 
was coming — what must come, indeed, 
by the very force of circumstances. The 
friendship which had sprung up from the 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


93 


first between Mr. Dundas and madame 
could not stop at friendship how, when 
both were free and evidently so neces- 
sary to each other. For madame, with 
that noble frankness backed by wise reti- 
cence characteristic of her, had told ev- 
ery one of her loss by which she had 
been necessitated to become beam’s gov- 
erness ; always adding, “ So that I am 
glad to be able to work, seeing that I am 
obliged to do so, as I could not borrow, 
even for a short time : I am too proud 
for that, and I hope too honest.” 

Wherefore, as she was evidently beam’s 
salvation, according to her own account, 
and Sebastian was confessedly her in- 
come, and a very good one too, there 
was no reason why their several lines 
should not coalesce in an indissoluble 
union, and one home be made to serve 
them instead of two. As indeed it came 
about. 

When the year of conventional mourn- 
ing had been perfected, on the anniver- 
sary of the very day when poor Pepita 
died, the final words were said, the last 
frail barrier of madame’s conjugal mem- 
ories and widowed regrets was removed, 
and Sebastian Dundas went home the 
gladdest man in England. All that long 
bad past was now to be redeemed, and 
he had made a good bargain with life to 
have passed through even so much mis- 
ery to come at the end into such reward. 

Nothing startled him, nothing chilled 
him. When madame, laying her hand 
on his arm, said in a kind of playful can- 
dor infinitely bewitching, ‘‘Remember, 
dear friend, I told you beforehand that 
I have lost all my fortune ; in marrying 
me you marry only myself with my past, 
my child and my liabilities,” his mind re- 
pudiated the idea of the flimsiest shadow 
on that past, the faintest blur on its spot- 
less record. As for her child, it was his ; 
he would give it his name, it should be 
dearer to him than his own ; which, all 
things considered, was not an overwhelm- 
ing provision of love ; and her liabilities, 
whatever they were, he would be glad to 
discharge them as a proof of his love for 
her and the forging of another golden 
link between them. 

He doubted nothing, believed all, and 


loved as much as he believed. He 
was happy, radiant, content : the woman 
whom he loved loved him, and had con- 
sented to become his wife. In giving her 
dear self to him she was also accepting 
security and devotion at his hands ; and 
what more can a true man want than to 
be of good service to the woman he loves ? 
If women like to minister, it is the pride 
of men to protect; and if the vow to 
endow with all his worldly goods is a 
fable in fact, it is true as an instinctive 
feeling. 

When Mrs. Harrowby heard that the 
marriage was positively arranged, she sat 
with her daughters at a kind of inquest 
on their dead friendship with Sebastian 
Dundas, and came to the conclusion that 
they must know something more definite 
now about this person calling herself 
Madame la Marquise de Montfort. As 
a stranger it was all very well to over- 
look the vagueness of her biography — 
they were not committed to anything 
really dangerous by simply visiting a 
householder among them — but it was 
another matter if she was to be married 
to one of themselves. Then they must 
learn who she really was, and Mr. Dun- 
das must satisfy them scrupulously, else 
they should decline to know her. 

‘‘ It will make a great gap in our so- 
ciety,” said kindly Josephine, who, hav- 
ing the most to suffer, had forgiven the 
most readily. 

‘‘Gap or no gap, it is what we owe to 
ourselves,” said Mrs. Harrowby. 

‘‘And to Edgar,” added Maria. 

‘‘ I shall call on Sebastian to-morrow,” 
said Mrs. Harrowby, laying aside her 
knitting with the air of a minister who 
has dictated his protocol and has now 
only to sign the clean copy. 

‘‘Sleep on it, mamma,” pleaded Jo- 
sephine. 

‘‘ It will make no difference,” returned 
the mother ; and her elder two echoed 
in concert, ‘‘ I hope not.” 

The next day Mrs. Harrowby did call 
on Mr. Dundas, and, finding that gen- 
tleman at home, succeeded in speaking 
her mind. She conveyed her ultimatum 
as a corporate not individual resolution, 
speaking in the name of the ‘‘ladies of 


94 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


the place,” which she was scarcely en- 
titled to do. 

Mr. Dundas declined to satisfy her. 
Indeed, it would have been difficult for 
him to have done so, seeing that he knew 
no more of Madame de Montfort, his in- 
tended wife, than what they all knew; 
which was substantially nothing, unless 
her fancy autobiography could be called 
something. He spoke, however, as if 
he had her private memoirs and all the 
branches, roots and bole of the family 
tree in his pocket ; and he spoke loftily, 
with the intimation that she was superior 
to all at North Aston, Mrs. Harrowby 
herself included. 

This interview, with its demand unsat- 
isfied and its assertions unproved, sent 
the coolness already existing between 
the Hill and Andalusia Cottage down to 
freezing-point; and the worst of it was 
that Mrs. Harrowby did not find back- 
ers. The neighborhood did not take up 
the cause as she expected it would. It 
halted midway and faced both sides, in 
the manner so dear to English respect- 
ability — less cordial to Mr. Dundas and 
madame than it would have been had 
Mrs. Harrowby been friendly, but un- 
willing to follow her to the bitter end. 
As they said to each other, it was all 
very well for Mrs. Harrowby to be so 
severe on the marriage, because she was 
angry and disappointed — and an angry 
and disappointed mother is ever unrea- 
sonable — but they who had no daughters 
to marry, really they did not see why 
they should persecute that poor madame 
who was such pleasant company, and 
had behaved herself with so much pro- 
priety since she came. And if Sebastian 
Dundas was going to make a second 
mistake, that was his lookout, and would 
be his punishment. 

On the whole, the neighborhood when 
polled was decidedly more friendly than 
hostile. The Corfields and Fairbairns 
were, as they had always been, neutrals of 
a genial tint, more for than against ; Mr. 
and Mrs. Birkett were warm partisans; 
and only Adelaide joined hands with the 
Hill and said that Mrs. Harrowby was 
justined in her renunciation and that 
madame was a wretch. And for the 


first time in her life the rector’s daughter 
spoke compassionately of Learn and hu- 
manely of Pepita, saying of the one how 
much she pitied her, having such a wo- 
man for a stepmother ; of the other, that, 
horrible as she was, at least they knew 
the worst of her, which was more than 
they could say of madame. 

She made her father very angry when 
she said these things, but she repeated 
them, nevertheless ; and she knew that 
he dared not scold her too severely before 
the world for fear of that little something 
called conscience, and knowledge of the 
reason why he believed in Madame de 
Montfort so implicitly. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

RECKONING WITH LEAM. 

The announcement of her father’s in- 
tended marriage with madame came on 
Learn with a crushing sense of terror and 
despair. Unobservant youth sees little, 
and even what it does see it does not 
comprehend. Though the girl had ac- 
customed herself by slow degrees to 
many works and ways which mamma 
had never known ; though the faculties 
which had been, as it were, imprisoned 
by that close-set, hide-bound love of hers 
were now a little loosened and set free ; 
though the activities of youth were stir- 
ring in her, and her inner life, if still 
isolated, was a shade more expanded 
than of old, — yet she had no desire for 
greater change, and she had no keener 
vision for the world outside herself than 
before. She saw nothing of that diabol- 
ical thing which her father and madame 
had been so long plotting as the outcome 
of their friendship, the parable of which 
her education had been the text. If her 
intelligence was warping out from the 
narrow limits in which her mother had 
confined it, it was still below the average 
— as much as her feverish love and te- 
nacious loyalty were above. All that she 
knew was, mamma dead was the same 
as mamma living, only to be more ten- 
derly dealt with, as she could not defend 
herself ; and that she wondered how papa 
could be so wicked as to affront her now 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


that she was not able to punish him and 
let him know what she thought of him. 

When he told her that he was going 
to give her a new mother, one whom she 
must love as she had loved her own poor 
dear mamma — he was so happy he could 
afford to be tender even to that terrible 
past and poor Pepita — beam’s first sen- 
sation was one of terror, her first move- 
ment one of repulsion. She flung off the 
hand which he had laid on her shoulder 
and drew back a few steps, facing him, 
her breath held, her tragic eyes flashing, 
her face struck to stone by what she had 
heard. 

“Well, my dear, you need not look so 
surprised,” said Mr. Dundas jauntily. 
“And you need not look so terrified. 
Your new mother will not hurt you.” 

“She shall not be my mother, papa,” 
said Learn : “ I will not own her.” 

“You will do what I tell you to do,” 
her father returned with admirable self- 
commiind. 

“Not when you tell me to do a crime,” 
flashed Learn. 

Mr. Dundas smiled. “Your words are 
a trifle strong,” he said. 

“It is a crime,” she reiterated. “But 
if you have forgotten mamma, and want 
to affront her now that she cannot de- 
fend herself, I have not, and never will.” 

Mr. Dundas smiled again. If he was 
so happy that he could afford to be ten- 
der to the past, so also could he afford to 
be patient with the present. “Foolish 
child!” he said compassionately: “you 
do not understand things yet.” 

“ I understand that I love mamma, and 
will not have this wicked woman in her 
place,” said Learn hotly. 

“ I think you will,” he answered, play- 
ing with his watch-guard. “And in the 
future, my little daughter, you will thank 
me.” 

“Thank you? For what ?” asked Learn. 
“You made mamma miserable when she 
lived : you and your madame helped to 
kill her, and now you put this woman in 
her place ! Papa, I wonder Saint Jago 
lets you live.” 

“As Saint Jago is kind enough to leave 
me in peace, perhaps you will follow his 
example. What a saint allows my little 


95 

daughter may accept,” said Mr. Dundas 
mockingly. 

“No,” said Learn with pathetic solem- 
nity, “ if the saints forget mamma, I will 
not.” 

“My dear, you are a fool,” said Mr. 
Dundas. 

“You may call me what you like, but 
madame shall not be my mother,” re- 
turned Learn. 

“ Madame will be your mother because 
she will be my wife,” said Mr. Dundas 
slowly. “Unfortunately for you — per- 
haps for myself also — neither you nor I 
can alter the law of the land. The child 
must accept the consequences of the 
father’s act.” 

“Then I will kill her,” cried Learn. 

Her father laughed gayly. “ I think 
we will brave this desperate danger,” he 
said. “ It is a fearful threat, I grant — an 
awful peril — but we must brave it, for all 
that.” 

“ Papa,” said Learn, “ I will pray to the 
saints that when you die you may not go 
to heaven with mamma and me.” 

It was her last bolt, her supreme effort 
at threat and entreaty, and it meant ev- 
erything. If her words of themselves 
would have amused Mr. Dundas as a 
child’s ignorant impertinence, the super- 
stition of an untaught, untutored mind, 
her looks and manner affected him pain- 
fully. True, he did not love her — on the 
contrary, he disliked her — but, all the 
same, she was his child ; and, dissected, 
realized, it was rather an awful thing that 
she had said. It showed an amount of 
hatred and contempt which went far be- 
yond his dislike for her, and made him 
shudder at the strength of feeling, the 
tenacity of hate, in one so young. 

If more absurdity than good sense is 
talked about natural affection, still there is 
a residuum of fact underneath the folly ; 
and Team’s words had struck down to 
that small residuum in her father’s heart. 
It was not that he was wounded sentiment- 
ally so much as in his sense of proprie- 
torship, his paternal superiority, and he 
was angry rather than sorrowful. It made 
him feel that he had borne with her way- 
wardness long enough now : it was time 
to put a stop to it. “Now, Learn, no 


96 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


more insolence and no more nonsense,” 
he said sternly. ‘‘You have tried my 
patience long enough. This day month 
I marry Madame de Montfort, with or 
without your pleasure, my little girl. In 
a month after that I bring her home here 
as my wife, consequently your mother, 
the mistress of the house and of you. I 
give you the best guide, the best friend, 
you have ever had or could have : you 
will live to value her as she deserves. 
Your own mother was not fit to guide 
you : your new one will make you all 
that my dearest hopes would have you. 
Now go. Think over what I have said. 
If you do not like our arrangements, so 
much the worse for you.” 

‘‘The saints will never let her come 
here as my mother. I will pray to them 
night and day to kill her,” said Learn in 
a deep voice, clenching her hands and 
setting her small square teeth, as her 
mother used to set hers, like a trap. 

Naturally, the second Mrs. Dundas 
could not be brought home without a 
certain upsetting of the old order and a 
rearrangement of things to suit the new. 
And the upsetting was not stinted, nor 
were the exertions of Mr. Dundas. He 
superintended everything himself, to the 
choice of a tea-cup,, the looping of a cur- 
tain, and racked his brains to make his 
beloved’s bower the fit expression of his 
love, though never to his mind could it 
be worthy of her deserving. There was 
not an ornament in the place but was 
dedicated to her, placed where she could 
see it on such and such an occasion, and 
shifted twenty times a day for a more 
advantageous position. Everything which 
the house had of most beautiful was press- 
ed into her service, and even beam’s nat- 
ural rights of inheritance were ignored 
for madame’s better endowing. Lace, 
jewelry, trinkets, all that had been Pepi- 
ta’s, was now hers, and the man’s rest- 
less desire to make her rich and her 
home beautiful seemed insatiable. 

But there was always Learn in the 
background with whom he had to reck- 
on — Learn, who wandered through the 
house in her straight-cut, plain black 
gown, made in the deepest fashion of 
mourning devisable, pale, silent, feverish, 


like an avenging spirit on his track ; un- 
doing what he had done if he had pro- 
faned an embodied memory of her moth- 
er, and as impervious to his anger as he 
was to her despair. 

One day he carried from the drawing- 
room to the boudoir which was to be 
madame’s, and had been Pepita’s, a cer- 
tain Spanish vase which had been a fa- 
vorite ornament with her because it 
reminded her of home. He firmly fixed 
it on the bracket destined for it, oppo- 
site the couch where he longed so ardent- 
ly to see his fair and queenly loved one 
sitting — he by her side in the lovers* 
paradise of secure content ; but the next 
time he went into the room he found it 
lying in fragments on the floor. None 
of the servants knew how the mischance 
had happened : the window was not open, 
and none of them had been in the room. 
How, then, came it there, broken on the 
floor ? When he asked Learn, wander- 
ing by in that pale, feverish, avenging 
way of hers, he knew the truth. 

‘‘Yes,” she said defiantly, ‘‘ I broke it. 
It was mamma’s, and your madame shall 
not have it.” 

‘‘ If you intend to go on like this I shall 
have you sent to school or shut up in a 
lunatic asylum,” cried Mr. Dundas in 
extreme wrath. 

‘‘Then I shall be alone with mamma, 
and shall not see you or your madame,” 
answered Learn, unconquered. 

‘‘You are a hardened, shameful, wick- 
ed girl,” said her father angrily. ‘‘Ma- 
dame is an angel of goodness to under- 
take the care of such a wretched crea- 
ture as you are. I could not do too much 
for her if I gave her all I had, and you 
can never be grateful enough for such a 
mother.” 

‘‘She is not my mother, and she shall 
not pollute mamma’s things,” Learn an- 
swered with passionate solemnity. ‘‘If 
you give them to her I will break or burn 
them. Mamma’s things are her own, 
and she shall not be made unhappy in 
heaven.” 

Provoked beyond himself, Sebastian 
Dundas said scornfully, ‘‘ HeaVen ! You 
talk of heaven as if you knew all about 
it. Learn, like the next parish. How do 


THE ATOEEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


97 


you know she is there, and not in the 
place of torment instead? Your mother 
was scarcely of the stuff of which angels 
are made.” 

” Then if she is in the place of torment, 
she is unhappy enough as it is, and need 
not be made more so,” said faithful Learn, 
suddenly breaking into piteous weeping ; 
adding through her sobs, ‘‘and madame 
shall not have her things.” 

Her tenacity carried the day so far that 
Mr. Dundas left off rearranging the old, 
and sent up to London for things new 
and without embarrassing memories at- 
tached to them. On which Learn swept 
off all that had been her mother’s, and 
locked up her treasures in her own pri- 
vate cupboard, carrying the key in the 
hiding - place which that mother had 
taught her to use, the thick coils of her 
hair. And her father, warned by that 
episode of the vase, and a little dom- 
inated, not to say appalled, by her reso- 
lute fidelity, shut his eyes to her domestic 
larceny and let her carry off her relics in 
safety. 

So the time passed, miserably enough 
to the one, if full of hope and the prom- 
ise of joy to the other ; and the wedding 
morning came whereon Sebastian Dun- 
das was to be made, as he phrased it, 
happy for life. 

It had been madame’s desire that Learn 
should be her bridesmaid. She had laid 
great stress on this, and her lover would 
have gratified her if he could. He had 
no wish that way — rather the contrary — 
but her will was his law, and he did his 
best to carry it into effect. But when he 
told Learn what he wanted — and he told 
her quite carelessly, and so much as a 
matter of course that he hoped she too 
would accept her position as a matter of 
course — the girl, enlightened by love if 
not by knowledge, broke into a torrent 
of disdain that soon showed him how 
sleeveless his errand was likely to be. 

He did his best, and tried all methods 
from pleading to threatening, but Learn 
was immovable. No power on earth 
should bend her, she said, or make her 
take part in that wicked day. She go to 
church ? Sh^ would expect to be struck 
dead if she md. She expected, indeed, 
7 


that all of them would be struck dead. She 
had prayed the saints so hard, so hard, 
to prevent this marriage, she was sure 
they would at the last ; and if they did 
not, she would never believe in them nor 
pray to them again. But she did believe 
in them, and she was sure they would 
punish this dreadful crime. No, she 
would take no part in it. Why should 
she put herself in the way of being pun- 
ished when she was not to blame ? 

So Mr. Dundas had the mortification 
of carrying to his bride-elect the intelli- 
gence that he had been worsted in his 
conflict with his daughter, and that her 
hatred and reluctance were to be neither 
concealed nor overcome. 

Madame was sorry, she said with her 
sweetest air of patience and liberal com- 
prehension. She would have liked the 
dear girl to have been her bridesmaid : it 
would have been appropriate and touch- 
ing. But as she declined — and her feel- 
ings were easy to be understood and hon- 
orable, if a little extreme— she, madame, 
elected to be married as a widow should, 
with only Mrs. Birkett and Mr. Fairbairn 
as the witnesses, Mr. Fairbairn to give 
her away for form’s sake. The dear rec- 
tor of course would marry them in this 
simple manner. They must hope that 
time and her own unvarying affection — 
Mr. Dundas called it sweetness, angelic 
patience, greatness of soul — would soften 
poor Learn into loving acceptance of what 
would be so much to her good when she 
could be got to understand it. Mean- 
while they must be patient — content to 
go gradually and gain her bit by bit. 
She, madame, would be quite content 
with her presence in the room, when 
they returned to breakfast, in the pretty 
white muslin frock ordered from town as 
the sign of her participation in the event. 

But when the morning came, where 
was Learn ? The most diligent search 
failed to discover her, and the only per- 
son who could have betrayed her where- 
abouts was the last whom they would 
have thought of asking. 

Of course, Mr. Dundas was properly 
distressed at this strange disappearance, 
and madame was unduly afflicted. She 
proposed that the marriage should be de- 


98 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


layed till the girl was found, but the lov- 
er was stronger than the father, and she 
was overruled — yielding because it is the 
duty of the wife to yield, but only because 
of that duty — for her own part desirous 
of delay until they were assured of the 
safety of Learn. 

The ceremony, however, was perform- 
ed within the canonical hours, the rector 
a little tremulous and apparently suffer- 
ing from sore throat ; and as the happy 
pair drove away, madame, remembering 
her advent and her objects more than a 
year ago now, could not but confess that 
she had done better than she expected, 
and, her conscience whispered, better 
than she deserved. 

All this time Learn was sitting on the 
lower branches of the yew tree beneath 
which that godless ruffian had murdered 
his poor sweetheart two generations ago 
in Steel’s Wood. It was a lonely corner, 
where no one would have gone by choice 
at the best of times, but now, with its 
bad name and evil association, it was en- 
tirely deserted. Learn had made it her 
hiding-place ever since madame had 
taken her in hand to teach her the cor- 
rect pronunciation of Shibboleth, and 
she had escaped from her teaching and 
run away into the wood, armed banditti 
and wild beasts notwithstanding. And 
one day, hunting in it for fungi, Alick 
Corfield had found her sitting there, and 
thenceforth they had shared the retreat 
ttetween them. 

No one knew that they met there, and 
no one suspected it — not even Mrs. Cor- 
field, who believed, after the manner of 
mothers who bring up their boys at home, 
that she knew the whole of her son’s life 
from end to end, and that he had not a 
thought kept back from her, nor had 
ever committed an action of which she 
was not cognizant. 

Alick had installed Learn as the girl- 
queen of his imagination, and paid her 
the homage which she seemed to him to 
deserve more than many a real queen 
crowned and sceptered or princess born 
in the purple. It pleased him to write 
bad poems to her as his Infanta, his royal 
rose, his pomegranate flower, his nestling 
eagle waiting for strength to fly upward 


to the sun — all with halting feet and 
strained metaphor. He drew pictures 
of her by the dozen, mostly symbolic 
and all out of drawing, but expressive 
of his admiration, his hope, his respect ; 
while to Learn he was little better than 
a two-legged talking dog whose know- 
ledge interested and whose goodness 
swayed her, but on whose neck she set 
her little foot and kept it there. She al- 
ways treated him with profound disdain, 
even when he told her curious things 
that were like fairy-tales, some of which 
she did not believe if they were too far 
removed from the narrow area of her 
personal experience. Thus, when he 
assured her that certain plants fed on 
flies as men feed on meat, she told him 
with her sublime Spanish calm, “ I do 
not believe it.” And she said the same 
when he one day informed her that the 
planets could be weighed and their dis- 
tance from the earth and the sun meas- 
ured. In the beginning she knew noth- 
ing — neither whether the earth was round 
or flat, nor what was the meaning of the 
stars, nor the name of one wild flower 
excepting daisies, nor of one great man. 
That fallow waste called her mind was 
virgin ground in truth, but Alick was pa- 
tient, and labored hard at the stubborn 
soil ; and when madame had given the 
credit to her own tact and those ugly lit- 
tle books from which she taught, it was 
to him really that Learn’ s microscopic 
amount of plasticity and reception was 
due. 

These secret meetings amused Learn, 
and kept her from that ceaseless inward 
contemplation of her mother which else 
was her only voluntary occupation. They 
gave her a sense of power, as well as of 
successful rebellion to her father, that 
gratified her pride. To be sure, they 
were not what niamma would have 
liked. Alick Corfield was an English- 
man, and mamma hated the English. 
But then. Learn reflected, she had not 
known Alick: if she had, she would 
have seen there was no harm in him, 
and that he was not teaching her things 
which a child of Spain ought not to 
know, and which Saint Jago would be 
angry with her for learning. And per- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


99 


haps now that mamma was up in heaven, 
and knew all that went on here at home, 
she would not mind her little Leama see- 
ing Alick Corfield so often. In her pray- 
ers she told her very faithfully all that 
she had done and felt and thought ; she 
never deceived her a hair’s breadth ; and 
as she had asked her permission so often 
and so humbly, she made sure now that 
it was granted. Mamma could not re- 
fuse her when she asked her so earnestly ; 
and she was not angry, but on the con- 
trary glad, that her little heart had such 
a good dog to care for her, and that she 
was defying el sehor papa, that false im- 
age of the false saint. 

For the rest, it was only natural that 
she should like the air of quasi adven- 
ture and independence which this un- 
known intercourse with Alick gave her. 
And as she was still in that conscience- 
less phase of youth when liking means 
everything, and honor without love is a 
grass having neither root nor flower, she 
continued to meet her faithful dog, and 
to learn from him — not all that he could 
tell her, but what she chose to accept. 

So here it was, perched among the 
lower branches of the yew tree in Steel’s 
Wood, that Learn spent her father’s wed- 
ding-day with Madame la Marquise de 
Montfort ; and when she became hungry 
Alick went home and brought her some 
dry bread and grapes from Steel’s Cor- 
ner. Dry bread and grapes — this was all 
that she would have, she said. She was 
not greedy like the English, who thought 
of nothing but eating, she added in her 
disdainful way ; and if Alick brought her 
anything but bread and grapes, she would 
fling it into the wood. On his life he 
was not to touch anything on papa’s 
table. She would rather die of hunger 
than eat their wicked food. She won- 
dered it did not choke them both. 

“Now go,’’ she said su^rbly, “and 
come back soon : I am hungry,’’ as if 
her sense of inconvenience was a catas- 
trophe which heaven and earth should 
be moved to avert. 

But young and so beautiful as she was, 
her little tricks of pride and arbitrari- 
ness were just so many additional charms 
to Alick ; and if she had not flouted and 


commanded him, he would have thought 
that something terrible was about to hap- 
pen : had she become docile, grateful, 
familiar, he would have expected her to 
die before the day was out. He liked 
her superb assumption of superiority. 
She was his girl-queen, and he was her 
slave ; she was his mistress, and he was 
her dog ; and, dog-like, he fawned at her 
feet even when she rated him and placed 
her little foot on his neck. 


CHAPTER XIX. 

AT steel’s corner. 

“I HOPE you will not be bored, my 
boy, but I am thinking of bringing that 
wretched Learn Dundas here for a few 
days. I don't like a girl of her age and 
character to be left for a full month 
alone. It is not right, for who knows 
what she may not do ? If she ran away 
on the wedding-day, she may run away 
again, and then where would we all be ? 
I cannot think what her father was about 
to leave her unprotected like this. So I 
shall just take and bring her here ; and 
if you are bored with her, you must make 
the best of it.’’ 

Mrs. Corfield and Alick were sitting in 
the “work-room’’ on the morning of the 
fifth day after the marriage, when the 
thought struck the little woman of the 
propriety of Leam’s visit to them for the 
month of her father’s absence. She did 
not see her son’s face when she spoke, 
being busy with her wood-carving. If 
she had, she would not have thought that 
the presence of Learn Dundas would bore 
or annoy him. The clumsy features glad- 
dened into smiles, the dull eye brighten- 
ed, the dim complexion flushed : if ever 
a face expressed supreme delight, Alick’s 
did then ; and it expressed what he felt, 
for, as we know, the one love of his boy- 
ish life was this girl-queen of his fancy. 
Not that he was in love with her in the 
ordinary sense of being in love. He was 
too reverent and she too young for vul- 
gar passion or commonplace sentiment. 
She was something precious to his imag- 
ination, not his senses, like a child-queen 
to her courtier, a high-born lady to her 


lOO 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


page. He bore with her girlish temper, 
her girlish insolence of pride, her igno- 
rant opposition, with the humility of 
strength bending its neck to weakness 
— the devotion and unselfish sweetness 
characteristic of him in other of his re- 
lations than those with Learn. Judge, 
then, if he was likely to be bored, as 
his mother feared, or if this project of 
a closer domestication with her was not 
rather a “bit of blue” in his sky which 
made these early autumn days gladder 
than the gladdest summer-time. 

To will and to do were synonymous 
with Mrs. Corfield : her motto was velle 
est agere ; and a resolve once taken was 
like iron at white heat, struck into the 
shape of deed on the instant. Darting 
up from her chair, birdlike and angu- 
lar, she put away her work."^ “ Order the 
trap,” she said briskly, “and come with 
me. We will go at once, before that 
poor creature has had time to do any- 
thing wild or silly.” 

“ I do not think she would do anything 
wild or silly, mother,” said Alick in a 
deprecating voice. It galled him to hear 
his darling spoken of so slightingly. 

“No? What has she ever done that 
was rational ?” cried his mother sharply. 
“From the beginning, when she was a 
baby of three months old, and howled at 
me because I kissed her, and that dread- 
ful mother of hers flew at me like a wild- 
cat and said I had the evil eye, Learn 
Dun das has been more like some change- 
ling than an ordinary English girl. I de- 
clare it sometimes makes my heart ache 
to see her with those awful eyes of hers, 
looking as if she had seen one does not 
know what — as if she was being literally 
burnt up alive with sorrow. However, 
don’t let us discuss her : let us fetch her 
and save her from herself. That is more 
to the purpose at this moment.” 

And Alick said “Yes,” and went out 
to order the trap with alacrity. 

When they reached Andalusia Cottage, 
the first thing they saw was a strange 
workman from Sherrington painting out 
the name which in his early love-days 
for his Spanish bride Sebastian Dundas 
had put up in bold letters across the gate- 
posts. The original name of the place 


had been Ford House, but the old had 
had to give place to the new in those 
days as in these, and Ford House had 
been rechristened Andalusia Cottage as 
a testimony and an homage. Mrs. Cor- 
field questioned the man in her keen in- 
quisitorial way as to what he was about ; 
and when he told her that the posts were 
to show “Virginia” now instead of “An- 
dalusia,” her great disgust, to judge by 
the sharp things which she said to him, 
seemed as if it took in the innocent hand 
as well as the peccant head. “ I do think 
Sebastian Dundas is bewitched,” she said 
disdainfully to her son as they drove up 
to the house. “ Did any one ever hear 
of such a lunatic ? Changing the name 
of his house with his wives in this man- 
ner, and expecting us to remember all 
his absurdities ! Such a man as that to 
be a father! Lord of the creation, in- 
deed ! He is no better than a court 
fool.” Which last scornful ejaculation 
brought the trap to the front door and 
into the presence of Learn. 

Standing on the lawn bareheaded in 
the morning sunshine, doing nothing 
and apparently seeing nothing, dressed 
in the deepest mourning she could make 
for herself, and with her high comb and 
mantilla as in olden days, her eyes fixed 
on the ground and her hands clasped in 
each other, her wan face set and rigid, 
her whole attitude one of mute, unfath- 
omable despair, — for the instant even 
Mrs. Corfield, with all her constitutional 
contempt for youth, felt hushed, as in 
the presence of some deep human trag- 
edy, at the sight of this poor sorrowful 
"child, this miserable mourner of fifteen. 
Instead of speaking in her usual quick 
manner, the sharp - faced little woman, 
poor Pepita’s “crooked stick,” went up 
to the girl quietly and softly touched her 
arm. 

Learn slovky raised her eyes. She did 
not start or cry out as a creature natu- 
rally would if startled, but she seemed 
as if she gradually and with difficulty 
awakened from sleep, or from something 
even more profound than sleep. “Yes ?” 
she said in answer to the touch. “What 
do you want ?” 

It was an odd question, and Leam’s 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


lOI 


grave intensity made it all the more odd. 
But Mrs. Corfield was not easily discon- 
certed, and it was “only Learn” at the 
worst. 

“I want you,” she answered briskly. 
“Tell the maid to pack up your box, 
take off that lace thing on your head, 
and come home with me for a day or 
two. You need not stay longer than 
you like, but it will be better for you than 
moping here, thinking of all sorts of 
things you had better not think of.” 

“Why do my thoughts vex you ?” ask- 
ed Learn gravely. “ I was not thinking 
of you.” 

Mrs. Corfield laughed a little confused- 
ly. “ I don’t suppose you were,” she 
said, “but you see I did think of you. 
But whether you were thinking of me or 
not, you certainly look as if you would 
be the better for a little rousing. You 
were standing there like a statue when 
we came up.” 

“I was listening to mamma,” said 
Learn with an air of grave rebuke. 

Mrs. Corfield rubbed her nose vigor- 
ously. “You would do better to come 
and talk to me instead,” she said. 

Beam transfixed her with her eyes. 
“ I like mamma’s company best,” she 
said in the stony way which she had 
when stiffening herself against outside 
influence. 

“ But if you come to us, you can listen 
to her as much as you like,” said Alick 
soothingly. “We will not hinder you ; 
and, as my mother says, it is not good 
for you to be here alone.” 

“I like it,” said Learn. 

“Nonsense! then you should not like 
it. It is not natural for a girl of your age 
to like it. Come with us,” cried Mrs. 
Corfield : “ why not ?” 

“ I have something to do,” Learn an- 
swered solemnly. 

“What can a chit of a thing like you 
have to do? Come with us, I tell you.” 
Mrs. Corfield said this heartily rather 
than roughly, though really she could 
not be bothered, as she said to herself, 
to stand there wasting her time in argu- 
ing with a girl like Learn. It was too 
ridiculous. 

Learn looked at her with mingled 


tragedy and contempt, and disdained to 
answer. 

“What have you got to do?” again 
asked Mrs. Corfield. 

“ I shall not tell you,” answered Learn, 
holding her head very high. 

How, indeed, should she tell this liltle 
sharp-faced woman that she was think- 
ing how she could prevent madame from 
coming here as her home ? The saints 
had deserted her; she had prayed to 
them, threatened them, coaxed, entreat- 
ed, but they had not heard her ; and now 
she had nothing but herself, only her 
poor little frail hands and bewildered 
brain, to protect her mother’s memory 
from insult and revenge her wrongs. The 
fever in her veins had given her mam- 
ma’s face sorrowful and weeping, meet- 
ing her wherever she turned — mamma’s- 
voice, faint as the softest summer breeze 
in the trees, whispering to her, “Little 
Leama, I am unhappy. Sweet heart, do 
not let me be unhappy.” For five days 
this fancy had haunted her, but it had 
not become distinct enough for guidance. 
She was listening now, as she was listen- 
ing always, for mamma to tell her what 
to do. She was sure she would show her 
in time how to prevent that wicked wo- 
man from living here, bearing her name, 
taking her place : mamma could trust 
her to take care of her, now that she 
could not take care of herself. As she 
had said to papa, if all the world, the 
saints, and God himself deserted her, 
she, her child, would not. 

She would not tell these thoughts, even 
to Alick. They were a secret, sacred be- 
tween her and mamma, and no one must 
share them. If, then, she went with this 
bird-like, insistent woman, she would talk 
to her and not let her think : she and 
Alick would stand between herself and 
mamma’s spirit, and then mamma would 
perhaps. leave her again, and go back to 
heaven angry with her. No, she would 
not go, and she lifted up her eyes to say 
so. 

As she looked up Alick whispered soft- 
ly, “Come.” 

Feverish, excited, her brain clouded 
by her false fancies, Learn did not rec- 
ognize his voice. To her it was her 


102 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEA A/ DUNDAS. 


mother sighing through the sunny still- 
ness, bidding her go with them, perhaps 
to find some method of hinderance or 
revenge which she could not devise for 
herself. They were clever and knew 
more than she did : perhaps her mother 
and the saints had sent them as her 
helpers. 

It seemed almost an eternity during 
which these thoughts passed through her 
brain, while she stood looking at Mrs. 
Corfield so intently that the little woman 
was obliged to lower her eyes. Not that 
Learn saw her. She was thinking, lis- 
tening, but not seeing, though her tragic 
eyes seemed searching Mrs. Corfield’s 
very soul. Then, glancing upward to 
the sky, she said with an air of self-sur- 
render, which Alick understood if his 
mother did not, “ Yes, I will go with you : 
mamma says I may.” 

‘‘ It is my belief, Alick,” said Mrs. Cor- 
field, when she had left them to prepare 
for her visit, ‘‘that poor child is going 
crazy, if she is not so already. She al- 
ways was queer, but she is certainly not 
in her right mind now. What a shame 
of Sebastian Dundas to bring her up as 
he has done, and now to leave her like 
this ! How glad I am I thought of hav- 
ing her at Steel’s Corner !” 

‘‘Yes, mother, it was a good thing. 
Just like you, though,” said Alick affec- 
tionately. 

‘‘You must help me with her, Alick,” 
answered his mother. ‘‘I have done 
what I know I ought to do, but she will 
be an awful nuisance all the same. She 
is so odd and cold and impertinent, one 
does not know how to take her.” 

Alick flushed and turned away his 
head. ‘‘I will take her off your hands 
as much as I can,” he said in a con- 
strained voice. 

‘‘That’s my dear boy — do,” was his 
mother’s unsuspecting rejoinder as Learn 
came down stairs ready to go. 

Steel’s Corner was a place of unrest- 
ing intellectual energies. Dr. Corfield, 
a man shut up in his laboratory with 
piles of extracts, notes, arguments, never 
used, but always to be used, an experi- 
mentalist deep in many of the toughest 
problems of chemical analysis, but nei- 


ther ambitious nor communicative, was 
the one peaceable element in the house. 
To be sure, Alick would have been both 
broader in his aims and more concen- 
trated in his objects had he been left to 
himself. As it was, the incessant de- 
mands made on him by his mother kept 
him too in a state of intellectual nomad- 
ism; and no one could weary of mo- 
notony where Mrs. Corfield set the pat- 
tern, unless it was of the monotony of 
unrest. This perpetual taking up of 
new subjects, new occupations, made 
thoroughness the one thing unattainable. 
Mrs. Corfield was a woman who went in 
for everything. She was by turns scien- 
tific and artistic, a student and a teacher, 
but she was too discursive to be accu- 
rate, and she was satisfied with a pro- 
ficiency far below perfection. In phi- 
losophy she was what might be called a 
woman of antepenultimates, referring all 
the more intricate moral and intellectual 
phenomena to mind and spirit ; but she 
was intolerant of any attempt to deter- 
mine the causation of her favorite causes, 
and she derided the modern doctrines 
of evolution and inherent force as athe- 
istic because materialistic. The two words 
meant the same thing with her ; and the 
more shadowy and unintelligible people 
made the causa causarum the more she 
believed in their knowledge and their 
piety. The bitterest quarrel she had ever 
had was with an old friend, an unimag- 
inative anatomist, who one day gravely 
proved to her that spirits must be mere 
filmy bags, pear- shaped, if indeed they 
had any visual existence at all. Bit by 
bit he eliminated all the characteristics 
and circumstances of the human form 
on the principle of the non-survival of 
the useless and unadaptable. For of 
what use are shapes and appliances if 
you have nothing for them to do ? — if 
you have no need to walk, to grasp, nor 
yet to sit ? Of what use organs of sense 
when you have no brain to which they 
lead ? — when you are substantially all 
brain and the result independent of the 
method ? Hence he abolished by logical 
and anatomical necessity, as well as tlie 
human form, the human face with eyes, 
ears, nose and mouth, and by the inex- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


orable necessities of the case came down 
to a transparent bag, pear-shaped, for 
the better passage of his angels through 
the air. 

“A fulfillment of the old proverb that 
extremes meet,” he said by way of con- 
clusion. ‘‘The beginning of man an as- 
cidian — his ultimate development as an 
angel, a pear-shaped, transparent bag.” 

Mrs. Corfield never forgave her old 
friend, and even now if any one began 
a conversation on the theory of develop- 
rnent and evolution she invariably lost 
her temper and permitted herself to say 
rude things. Her idea of angels and 
souls in bliss was the good orthodox no- 
tion of men and women with exactly the 
same features and identity as they had 
when in the flesh, but infinitely more 
beautiful ; retaining the Ego, but the Ego 
refined and purified out of all trace of 
human weakness, all characteristic pas- 
sions, tempers and proclivities ; and the 
pear-shaped bag was as far removed from 
the truth, as she held it, on the one side 
as Team’s materialistic conception was 
on the other. The character and con- 
dition of departed souls was one of the 
subjects on which she was very positive 
and very aggressive, and Team had a 
hard fight of it when her hostess came 
to discuss her mother’s present person- 
ality and whereabouts, and wanted to 
convince her of her transformation. 

All the same, the little woman was 
kind-hearted and conscientious, but she 
was not always pleasant. She wanted 
the grace and sweetness known generi- 
cally as womanliness, as do most women 
who hold the doctrine of feminine moral 
supremacy, with base man, tyrant, en- 
emy and inferior, holding down the su- 
perior being by force of brute strength 
and responsible for all her faults. And 
she wanted the smoothness of manner 
known as good breeding. Though a 
gentlewoman by birth, she gave one the 
impression of a pert chambermaid ma- 
tured into a tyrannical landlady. 

But she meant kindly by Team when 
she took her from the loneliness of her 
father’s house, and her very sharpness 
and prickly spiritualism were for the 
child’s enduring good. Her attempts. 


ro3 

however, to make Team regard mamma 
in heaven as in any wise different from 
mamma on earth were utterly abortive. 
Team’s imagination could not compass 
the thaumaturgy tried to be inculcated. 
Mamma, if mamma at all, was mamma 
as she had known her; and if as she 
had known her, then she was unhappy 
and desolate, seeing what a wicked thing 
this was that papa had done. She clung 
to this point as tenaciously as she clung 
to her love ; and nothing that Mrs. Cor- 
field, or even Alick, could say weakened 
by one line her belief in mamma’s angry 
sorrow and the saints’ potent and some- 
times peccant humanity. 

Among other scientific appliances at 
Steel’s Corner was a small off-kind of 
laboratory for Alick and his mother, to 
prevent their troubling the doctor and to 
enable them to help him when necessary : 
it was an auxiliary fitted up in what was 
rightfully the stick -house. The sticks 
had had to make way for retorts and 
crucibles, and as yet no harm had come 
of it, though the servants said they lived 
in terror of their lives, and the neighbors 
expected daily to hear that the inmates 
of Steel’s Corner had been blown into 
the air. Into this evil-smelling and un- 
beautiful place Team was introduced with 
infinite reluctance on her own part. The 
bad smell made her sick, she said, turn- 
ing round disdainfully on Alick, and she 
did not wonder now at anything he might 
say or do if he could bear to live in such 
a horrid place as this. 

When he showed off a few simple ex- 
periments to amuse her — made crystal 
trees, a shower of snow, a heavy stone 
out of two empty-looking bottles, spilt 
mercury and set her to gather it up again, 
showed her prisms, and made her look 
through a bit of tourmaline, and in every 
way conceivable to him strewed the path 
of learning with flowers — then she began 
to feel a little interest in the place and 
left off making wry faces at the dirt and 
the smells. 

One day when she was there her eye 
caught a very small phial with a few let- , 
ters like a snake running spirally round 
it. 

‘‘What is that funny little bottle ?” she 


104 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


asked, pointing it out. “What does it 
say ?’’ 

“Poison,” said Alick. 

“What is poison T' she asked. 

“Do you mean what it is ? or what it 
does?” he returned. 

“Both. You are stupid,” said Learn. 

“What it does is to kill people, but I 
cannot tell you all in a breath what it is, 
for it is so many things.” 

“How does it kill people?” At her 
question Learn turned suddenly round 
on him, her eyes full of a strange light. 

“Some poisons kill in one way and 
some in another,” answered Alick. 

Learn pondered for a few moments ; 
then she asked, “How much poison is 
there in the world ?” 

“An immense deal,” said Alick: “I 
cannot possibly tell you how much.” 

“And it all kills ?” 

“Yes, it all kills, else it is not poison.” 

“ And every one ?” 

“Yes, every one if enough is taken.” 

“What is enough ?” she asked, still so 
serious, so intent. 

Alick laughed. “That depends on 
the material,” he said. “One grain of 
some and twenty of others.” 

“Don’t laugh,” said Learn with her 
Spanish dignity: “I am serious. You 
should not laugh when I am serious.” 

“ I did not mean to offend you,” faltered 
Alick humbly. “Will you forgive me ?” 

“Yes,” said Learn superbly, “if you 
will not laugh again. Tell me about 
poison.” 

“What can I tell you? I scarcely 
know what it is you want to hear.” 

“What is poison ?” 

“ Strychnine, opium, prussic acid, bella- 
donna, aconite — oh, thousands of things.” 

“How do they kill ?” 

“ Well, strychnine gives awful pain and 
convulsions — makes the back into an 
arch ; opium sends you to sleep ; prussic 
acid stops the action of the heart ; and 
so on.” 

“What is that?” asked Learn, point- 
ing to the small phial with its snake-like 
spiral label. 

“Prussic acid — awfully strong. Two 
drops of that would kill the strongest 
man in a moment.” 


“In a moment?” asked Learn. 

“Yes : he would fall dead directly.” 

“Would it be painful T' 

“ No, not at all, I believe.” 

“Show it me,” said Learn. 

He took the bottle from the shelf. It 
was a sixty-minim bottle, quite full, stop- 
pered and secured. 

She held out her hand for it, and he 
gave it to her. “Two drops!” mused 
Learn. 

“Yes, two drops,” returned Alick. 

“How many drops are here ?” 

“Sixty.” 

“ Is it nasty ?” 

“ No — like very strong bitter almonds 
or cherry -water ; only in excess,” he said. 
“ Here is some cherry- water. Will you 
have a little in some water ? It is not 
nasty, and it will not hurt you.” 

“No,” said Learn with an offended air : 
“ I do not want your horrid stuff.” 

“ It would not hurt you, and it is really 
rather nice,” returned Alick apologeti- 
cally. 

“It is horrid,” said Learn. 

“Well, perhaps you are better without 
it,” Alick answered, quietly taking the 
bottle of prussic acid from her hands and 
replacing it on the shelf, well barricaded 
by phials and pots. 

“You should not have taken it till I 
gave it you,” said Learn proudly. “You 
are rude.” 

From this time the laboratory had the 
strangest fascination for Learn. She was 
never tired of going there, never tired of 
asking questions, all bearing on the sub- 
ject of poisons, which seemed to have 
possessed her. Alick, unsuspecting, glad 
to teach, glad to see her interest awaken- 
ed in anything he did or knew, in his 
own honest simplicity utterly unable to 
imagine that things could turn wrong on 
such a matter, told her all she asked and 
a great deal more ; and still Leam’s eyes 
wandered ever to the shelf where the little 
phial of thirty deaths was enclosed with- 
in its barricades. 

One day while they were there Mrs. 
Corfield called Alick. 

“ Wait for me, I shall not be long,” 
he said to Learn, and went out to his 
mother. 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


As he turned Learn’ s eyes went again 
to that small phial of death on the shelf. 

“ Take it, Leama ! take it, my heart !” 
she heard her mother whisper. 

“Yes, mamma,” she said aloud; and 
leaping like a young panther on the 
bench, reached to the shelf and thrust 
the little bottle in her hair. She did not 
know why she took it ; she had no mo- 
tive, no object. It was mamma who told 
her — so her unconscious desire trans- 
lated itself — but she had no clear under- 
standing why. It was instinct, vague but 
powerful, lying at the back of her mind, 
unknown to herself that it was there ; 
and all of which she was conscious was 
a desire to possess that bottle of poison, 
and not to let them know here that she 
had taken it. 

This was on the afternoon of her last 
day at the Corfields. She was to go 
home to-night in preparation for the ar- 
rival of her father and madame to-mor- 
row, and in a few hours she would be 
away. She did not want Alick to come 
back to the laboratory. She was afraid 
that he would miss the bottle which she 
had secured so almost automatically if 
so superstitiously : Alick must not come 
back. She must keep that bottle. She 
hurried across the old-time stick-house, 
locked the door and took the key with 
her, then met Alick coming back to fin- 
ish his lesson on the crystallization of 
alum, and said, “ I am tired of your col- 
ored doll’s jewelry. Come and tell me 
about flowers,” leading the way to the 
garden. 

Doubt and suspicion were qualities un- 
known to Alick Corfield. It never oc- 
curred to him that his young queen was 
playing a part to hide the truth, befool- 
ing him for the better concealment of 
her misdeeds. He was only too happy 
that she condescended to suggest how he 
should amuse her ; so he went with her 
into the garden, where she sat on the 
rustic chair, and he brought her flowers 
and told her the names and the proper- 
ties as if he had been a professor. 

At last Learn sighed. “ It is very tire- 
some,” she said wearily. “I should like 
to know as much as you do, but half of 
it is nonsense, and it makes my head 


105 

ache to learn. I wish I had my dolls 
here, and that you could make ‘them talk 
as mamma used. Mamma made them 
talk and go to sleep, but you are stupid : 
you can speak only of flowers that don’t 
feel, and about your silly crystals that go 
to water if they are touched. I like my 
zambomba and my 4olls best. They do 
not go to water : my zambomba makes a 
noise, and my dolls can be beaten when 
they are naughty.” 

“But you see I am not a girl,” said Alick 
blushing. 

“ No,” said Learn, “you are only a boy. 
What a pity !” 

“ I am sorry if you would like me bet- 
ter as a girl,” said Alick. 

She looked at him superbly. Then 
her face changed to something that was 
almost affection as she answered in a 
softer tone, “You would be better as a 
girl, of course, but you are good for a 
boy, and I like you the best of every one 
in England now. If only you had been 
an Andalusian woman !” she sighed, as, 
in obedience to Mrs. Corfield’s signal, 
she got up to prepare for dinner, and 
then home for her father and madame 
to-morrow. 


CHAPTER XX. 

IN HER mother’s PLACE. 

Whatever madame’s past life had 
been — and it had been such as a hand- 
some woman without money or social 
status, fond of luxury and to whom work 
was abhorrent, with a clear will and very 
distinct knowledge of her own desires, 
clever and destitute of moral principle, 
finds made to her hand — whatever ugly 
bits were hidden behind the veil of de- 
cent pretence which she had worn with 
such grace during her sojourn at North 
Aston, she did honestly mean to do right- 
eously now. 

She had deceived the man who had 
married her in such adoring good faith — 
granted; but when he had reconciled 
himself to as much of the cheat as he 
must know, she meant to make him hap- 
py — so happy that he should not regret 
what he had done. Though she was no 


Io6 THE ATONEMENT 

marquise, only plain Madame de Mont- 
fort — so far she must confess for policy’s 
sake, and to forestall discovery by ruder 
means, but what remained beyond she 
must keep secret as the grave, trusting 
to favorable fortune and man’s honor for 
her safety — though the story of the fraud- 
ulent trustee was untrue, and she never 
had more money than the three hundred 
pounds brought in her box wherewith to 
plant her roots in the North Aston soil — 
though all the Lionnet bills were yet to 
be paid, and her husband must pay them, 
with awkward friends in London occa- 
sionally turning up to demand substan- 
tial sops, else they would show their teeth 
unpleasantly, — still, she would get his 
forgiveness, and she would make him 
happy. 

And she would be good to Learn. She 
would be so patient, forbearing, tender, 
she would at last force the child to love 
her. It was a new luxury to this woman, 
who had knocked about the world so long 
and so disreputably, to feel safe and able 
to be good. She wondered what it would 
be like as time went on — if the rest which 
she felt now at the cessation of the strug- 
gle and the consciousness of her seicurity 
would become monotonous or be always 
restful. At all events, she knew that she 
was happy for the day, and she trusted 
to her own tact and management to make 
the future as fair as the present. 

The home-coming was triumphant. 
Because the rector was inwardly grieved 
at the loss of his ewe-lamb — for he had 
lost her in that special sense of spiritual 
proprietorship which had been his — he 
was determined to make a demonstration 
of his joy. He and Mrs. Birkett meant 
to stand by Mrs. Dundas as they had 
stood by Madame la Marquise de Mont- 
fort, and to publish their partisanship 
broadly. When, therefore, the travelers 
returned to North Aston, they found the 
rector and his wife waiting to receive 
them at their own door. Over the gate 
was an archway of evergreens with “Wel- 
come !’’ in white chrysanthemums, and 
the posts were wreathed with boughs and 
ribbons, but leaving “Virginia Cottage” 
in its glossy evidence of the new regime. 
The drive was bordered all through with 


OF LEAM DUNDAS. 

flowers from the rectory garden, and 
Lionnet too had been ransacked, and 
the hall was festooned from end to end 
with garlands, like a transformation-scene 
in a pantomime. One might have thought 
it the home-coming of a young earl with 
his girl-bride, rather than that of a mid- 
dle-aged widower of but moderate means 
with his second wife, one of whose past 
homes had been in St. John’s Wood, and 
one of her many names Mrs. Harrington. 

But it pleased the good souls who thus 
displayed their sympathy, and it gratified 
those for whom it had all been done ; and 
both husband and wife expressed their 
gratitude warmly, and lived up to the oc- 
casion in the emotion of the moment. 

When their effusiveness had a little 
calmed down, when Mrs. Dundas had 
caressed her child — which poor Mrs. Bir- 
kett gave up to her with tears — and Mr. 
Dundas had also taken it in his arms 
and called it “ Little Miss Dundas ” and 
“My own little Fina” tenderly — when 
the servants had been spoken to prettily 
and the bustle had somewhat subsided, 
Mrs. Dundas looked round for something 
missing. “And where is dear Learn?” 
she asked with her gracious air and sweet 
smile. 

It was very nice of her to be the first 
to miss the girl. The father had forgot- 
ten her, friends had overlooked her, but 
the stepmother, the traditional oppressor, 
was thoughtful of her, and wanted to in- 
clude her in the love afloat. This little 
circumstance made a deep impression on 
the three witnesses. It was a good omen 
for Learn, and promised what indeed her 
new mother did honestly design to per- 
form. 

“ Even that little savage must be tamed 
by such persistent sweetness,” said Mr. 
Birkett to his wife, while she, with a kind- 
ly half-checked sigh, true to her central 
quality of maternity and love of peace 
all round, breathed “Poor little Learn !” 
compassionately. 

Learn, however, was no more to the 
fore at the home-coming than she had 
been at the marriage, and much search- 
ing went on before she was found. She 
was unearthed at last. The gardener 
had seen her shrink awg-y into the shrub- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


107 


bery when the carriage-wheels were heard 
coming up the road, and he gave infor- 
mation to the cook, by whom the truant 
was tracked and brought to her ordeal. 

Mrs. Birkett went out by the French 
window to meet her as she came slowly 
up the lawn draped in the deep mourn- 
ing which for the very contrariety of love 
she had made deeper since the marriage, 
her young head bent to the earth, her 
pale face rigid with despair, her heart 
full of but one feeling, her brain racked 
with but one thought, “ Mamma is cry- 
ing in heaven : mamma must not cry, 
and this stranger must be swept from 
her place.” 

She did not know how this was to be 
done : she only knew that it must be 
done. She had all along expected the 
saints to w'ork some miracle of deliver- 
ance for her, and she looked hourly for 
its coming. She had prayed to them so 
passionately that she could not under- 
stand why they had not answered. Still, 
she trusted them. She had told them 
she was angry, and that she thought 
them cruel for their delay ; and in her 
heart she believed that they knew they 
had done wrong, and that the miracle 
would be wrought before too late. It 
was for mamma, not for herself. Ma- 
dame must be swept like a snake out of 
the house, that mamma might no long- 
er be pained in heaven. Personally, it 
made no difference whether she had to 
see madame at Lionnet or here at home, 
but it made all the difference to mamma, 
and that w'as all for which she cared. 

Thinking these things, she met Mrs. 
Birkett midway on the lawn, the kind 
soul having come out to speak a sooth- 
ing word before the poor child went in, 
to let her feel that she was sympathized 
with, not abandoned by them all. Fond 
as she was of madame, the new Mrs. 
Dundas, and little as she knew of Learn, 
the facts of the case were enough for her, 
and she saw Adelaide and herself in the 
child’s sorrow and poor Pepita’s succes- 
sor. ‘‘My dear,” she said affectionately 
as she met the girl walking so slowly up 
the lawn, ‘‘ I dare say this is a trial to 
you, but you must accept it for your 
good. I know what you must feel, but 


it is better for you to have a good kind 
stepmother, who will be your friend and 
instructress, than to be left with no one 
to guide you.” 

Beam’s sad face lifted itself up to the 
speaker. ‘‘ It cannot be good for me if 
it is against mamma,” she said. 

‘‘ But, Learn, dear child, be reasonable. 
Your mamma, poor dear ! is dead, and, 
let us trust, in heaven.” The good soul’s 
conscience pricked her when she said this 
glib formula, of which in this present in- 
stance she believed nothing. ‘‘Your father 
has the most perfect right to marry again. 
Neither the Church nor the Bible forbids 
it ; and you cannot expect him to remain 
single all his life — when he needs a wife 
so much, too, on your account — ^because 
he was married to your dear mamma 
when she was alive. Besides, she has 
done with this life and all the things of 
the earth by now ; and even if she has 
not, she will be happy to see you, her 
dear child, well cared for and kindly 
mothered.” 

Learn raised her eyes with sorrowful 
skepticism, melancholy contempt. It was 
the old note of war, and she responded to 
it. ‘‘I know mamma,” she said: ‘‘I know 
what she is feeling.” 

She would have none of their spiritual 
thaumaturgy — none of that unreal kind 
of transformation with which they had 
tried to modify their first teaching. There 
was no satisfaction in imagining mamma 
something different from her former self — 
no more the real, fervid, passionate, jeal- 
ous Pepita than those pear-shaped trans- 
parent bags, so logically constructed by 
Mrs. Corfield’s philosopher, are like the 
ideal angels of loving fancy. If mamma 
saw and knew w^hat was going on here at 
this present moment — and Mrs. Birkett 
was not the bold questioner to doubt this 
continuance of interest — she felt as she 
would have felt when alive, and she 
would be angry, jealous, weeping, un- 
happy. 

Mrs. Birkett was puzzled what to say 
for the best to this uncomfortable fanatic, 
this unreasonable literalist. When be- 
lievers have to formularize in set words 
their hazy notions of the feelings and 
conditions of souls in bliss, they make 


io8 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


but a lame business of it ; and nothing 
that the dear woman could propound, 
keeping on the side of orthodox spirit- 
uality, carried comfort or conviction to 
Learn. Her one unalterable answer was 
always simply, “ I know mamma : I know 
what she is feeling,” and no argument 
could shake her from her point. 

At last Mrs. Birkett gave up the con- 
test. ‘‘Well, my child,” she said, sigh- 
ing, ‘‘ I can only hope that the constant 
presence of your stepmother, her kind- 
ness and sweetness, will in time soften 
your feeling toward her.” 

Learn looked at her earnestly. ‘‘ It is not 
for myself,” she said : ‘‘it is for mamma.” 

And she said it with such pathetic sin- 
cerity, such an accent of deep love and 
self-abandonment to her cause, that the 
rector’s wife felt her eyes filling up in- 
voluntarily with tears. Wrong-headed, 
dense, perverse as Learn was, her filial 
piety was at the least both touching and 
sincere, she said to herself, a pang pass- 
ing through her heart. Adelaide would 
not speak of her if she were dead as 
this poor ignorant child spoke of her 
mother. Yet she had been to Adelaide 
all that the best and most affectionate 
kind of English mother can be, while 
Pepita had been a savage, now cruel and 
now fond ; one day making her teeth meet 
in her child’s arm, another day stifling 
her with caresses ; treating her by times 
as a woman, by times as a toy, and never 
conscientious or judicious. 

All the same, Leam’s fidelity, if touch- 
ing, was embarrassing as things were ; so 
was her belief in the continued existence 
of her mother. But what can be done 
with those uncompromising reasoners 
who will carry their creeds straight to 
their ultimates, and will not be put off with 
eclectic compromises of this part known 
and that hidden — so much sure and so 
much vague? Mrs. Birkett determined 
that her husband should talk to the child 
and try to get a little common sense into 
her head, but she doubted the success of 
the process, perhaps because in her heart 
she doubted the skill of the operator. 

By this time they reached the window, 
and the woman and the girl passed 
through into the room. 


Mrs. Dundas came forward to meet 
her stepdaughter kindly — not warmly, 
not tumultuously — with her quiet, easy, 
waxen grace that never saw when things 
were wrong, and that always assumed the 
halcyon seas even in the teeth of a gale. 
F or her greeting she bent forward to kiss 
the girl’s face, saying, ‘‘My dear child, I 
am glad to see you,” but Learn turned 
away her head. 

‘‘ I am not glad to see you, and I will 
not kiss you,” she said. 

Her father frowned, his wife smiled. 
‘‘You are right, my dear: it is a foolish 
habit,” she said tranquilly, ‘‘but we are 
such slaves to silly habits,” she added, 
looking at the rector and his wife in her 
pretty philosophizing way, while they 
smiled approvingly at her ready wit and 
serene good-temper. 

‘‘ Will you say the same to me. Learn ?” 
asked her father with an attempt at joc- 
ularity, advancing toward her. 

‘‘Yes,” said Learn gravely, drawing 
back a step. 

‘‘Tell me, Mrs. Birkett, what can be 
done with such an impracticable crea- 
ture ?” cried Mr. Dundas. 

‘‘She will come right in time, dear 
husband,” said the late marquise sweet- 
ly ; and Mrs. Birkett echoed, looking at 
the girl kindly, ‘‘Oh yes, she will come 
right in time.” 

‘‘ If you mean by coming right, letting 
you be my mamma, I never will,” cried 
Learn, fronting her stepmother. 

‘‘Silence, Learn!” cried Mr. Dundas 
angrily. 

His wife laid her taper fingers tender- 
ly on his. ‘‘ No, no, dear husband : let 
her speak,” she pleaded, her voice and 
manner admirably effective. ‘‘ It is far 
better for her to say what she feels than 
to brood over it in silence. I can wait 
till she comes to me of her own accord 
and says, ‘ Mamma, I love you : forgive 
me the past.’ ” 

“You are an angel,” said Mr. Dundas, 
pressing her hand to his lips, his eyes 
moist and tender. 

“I always said it,” the rector added 
huskily — “the most noble - natured wo- 
man of my acquaintance.” 

“I never will come to you and say, 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


109 


* Mamma, I love you,* and ask you to 
forgive me for being true to my own 
mamma,” said Learn. ‘‘I am mamma’s 
daughter, no other person’s.” 

Mrs. Dundas smiled. ‘‘You will be 
mine, sweet child,” she said. 

How ugly beam’s persistent hate look- 
ed by the side of so much unwearied 
goodness ! Even Mrs. Birkett, who pit- 
ied the poor child, thought her tenacity 
too morbid, too dreadful ; and the rector 
honestly held her as one possessed, and 
regretted in his own mind that the Church 
had no formula for efficient exorcism. 
Believing, as he did, in the actuality of 
Satan, the theory of demoniacal posses- 
sion came easy as the explanation of 
abnormal qualities. 

Her father raged against himself in 
that he had given life to so much moral 
deformity. And yet it was not from him 
that she inherited ‘‘that cursed Span- 
ish blood,” he said, turning away with 
a groan, including Pepita, Learn, all his 
past with its ruined love and futile dreams, 
its hope and its despair, in that one bitter 
word. 

‘‘ Don’t say that, papa : mamma and I 
are true. It is you English that are bad 
and false,” said Learn at bay. 

Mrs. Dundas raised her hand. ‘‘ Hush, 
hush, my child!” she said in a tone of 
gentle authority. ‘‘ Say of me and to me 
what you like, but respect your father.” 

‘‘ Oh, Learn has never done that,” cried 
Mr. Dundas with intense bitterness. 

‘‘No,” said Learn, ‘‘ I never have. You 
made manuma unhappy when she was 
alive : you are making her unhappy now. 
I love mamma : how can I love you ?” 

And then, her words realizing her 
thoughts in that she seemed to see her 
mother visibly before her, sorrowful and 
weeping while all this gladness was about 
in the place which had once been hers, 
and whence she was now thrust aside — 
these flowers of welcome, these smiling 
faces, this general content, she alone 
unhappy, she who had once been queen 
and mistress of all — the poor child’s heart 
broke down, and she rushed from the 
room, too proud to let them see her cry, 
but too penetrated with anguish to restrain 
the tears. 


‘‘ I am sure I don’t know what on earth 
we can do with that girl,” said Mr. Dun- 
das with a dash of his old weak petu- 
lance, angry with circumstance and un- 
able to dominate it — the weak petulance 
which had made Pepita despise him so 
heartily, and had winged so many of her 
shafts. 

‘‘Time and patience,” said madame 
with her grand air of noble cheerfulness. 
But she had just a moment’s paroxysm 
of dismay as she looked through the 
coming years, and thought of life shared 
between Beam’s untamable hate and her 
husband’s unmanly peevishness. For 
that instant it seemed to her that she had 
bought her personal ease and security at 
a high price. 

As Learn went up stairs the door of 
her stepmother’s room was standing open. 
The maid had unpacked the boxes most 
in request, and was now at tea in the 
servants’ hall, telling of her adventures 
in Paris, where master and mistress had 
spent the honeymoon, and in her own 
way the heroine of the hour, like her 
betters in the parlor. The world seem- 
ed all wrong everywhere, life a cheat and 
love a torture, to Learn, as she stood with- 
in the open door, looking at the room 
which had been hers and her mother’s, 
now transformed and appropriated to this 
stranger. She did not understand how 
papa could have done it. The room in 
which mamma had lived, the room in 
which she had died, the window from 
which she used to look, the very mirror 
that used to reflect back her beautiful 
and beloved face — ah, if it could only 
have kept what it reflected ! — and papa 
to have given all this away to another 
woman ! Poor mamma ! no wonder she 
was unhappy. What could she. Learn, 
do to prevent all this wickedness if the 
blessed ones were idle and would not 
help her ? 

Her eyes fell on a bottle placed on the 
cohsole where madame’s night appli- 
ances were ranged — ^her night-light and 
the box of matches, her Bible and a 
hymn-book, a tablespoon, a carafe full 
of water and a tumbler, and this bottle 
marked ‘‘Cherry- water — one tablespoon- 
ful for a dose.” In madame’s hand- 


no 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


writing underneath stood, “For my trou- 
blesome heart.” Only about two table- 
spoonsful were left. 

Learn took the bottle in one hand, the 
other thrust itself mechanically into her 
hair. No one was about, and the house 
was profoundly still, save for the voices 
coming up from the room below in a 
subdued and not unpleasant murmur, 
with now and then the child’s shrill bab- 
ble breaking in through the deeper tones 
like occasional notes in a sonata. Out 
of doors were all the pleasant sights and 
sounds of the peaceful evening coming 
on after the labors of the busy day. The 
birds were calling to each other in the 
woods before nesting for the night ; the 
homing rooks flew round and round their 
trees, cawing loudly ; the village dogs 
barked their welcome to their masters 
as they came off the fields and the day’s 
work ; and the setting sun dyed the au- 
tumn leaves a brighter gold, a deeper 
crimson, a richer russet. It was all so 
peaceful, all so happy, in this soft mild 
evening of the late September — all seem- 
ed so full of promise, so eloquent of fu- 
ture joy, to those who had just begun 
their new career. 

But Learn knew nothing of the poetry 
of the moment — felt nothing of its pa- 
thetic irony in view of the deed she was 
half-unconsciously designing. She saw 
only, at first dimly, then distinctly, that 
here were the means by which mamma’s 
enemy might be punished and swept from 
mamma’s place, and that if she failed 
her opportunity now she would be a 
traitor and a coward, and would fail in 
her love and duty to mamma. No, she 
would not fail. Why should she ? It 
was the way which the saints themselves 
had opened, the thing she had to do; 
and the sooner it was done the better for 
mamma. 

She uncorked the bottle of cherry-wa- 
ter, good for that troublesome heart of 
poor madame’s. All that Alick had told 
her of the action of poisons came back 
upon her as clearly as her mother’s words, 
her mother’s voice. This cherry-water, 
too, had the smell of bitter almonds, and 
was own sister to that in the little phial 
in her other hand. Now she understood 


it all — why she had been taken to Steel’s 
Corner, why Alick had taught her about 
poisons, and why her mamma had told 
her to steal that bottle. She looked at it 
with its eloquent paper marked “ Poison ” 
wound about it spirally like a snake, un- 
corked it and emptied half into the cher- 
ry-water. 

“ Two drops are enough, and there are 
more than two there,” she said to her- 
self. “ Mamma must be safe now.” And 
with this she left the room and went into 
her own to watch and wait. 

It was early to-night when Mrs. Dun- 
das retired. There were certain things 
which she wanted to do on this her first 
night in her new home ; and among them 
she wanted to put that green velvet pock- 
et-book, gold embroidered, in some ab- 
solutely safe place, where it would not 
be seen by prying eyes or fall into dan- 
gerous hands. She did not intend to 
destroy its contents. She knew enough 
of the uncertainty of life to hold by all 
sorts of anchorages ; and though things 
looked safe and sweet enough now, they 
might drift into the shallows again, and 
she wished her little Fina’s future to be 
assured by one or other of those charged 
with it — if the stepfather failed, then to 
fall back on the father. Wherefore she 
elected to keep these papers in a safe 
place rather than destroy them, and the 
safest place she could think of was Pepi- 
ta’s jewel-case, now her own. It had a 
curious lock, which no other key than its 
own would fit — a lock that would have 
baffled even a “cracksman’’ and his 
whole bunch of skeleton keys. 

In putting them away, obliged for the 
need of space to take off the paper wrap- 
pings, she was foolish enough to look at 
the photographs within — just one last look 
before banishing them for ever from her 
sight, as an honest wife should — and the 
sight of the handsome young face which 
she had loved sincerely in its day, and 
which was the face of her child’s father, 
shook her nerves more than she liked 
them to be shaken. That troublesome 
heart of hers had begun to play her 
strange tricks of late with palpitation and 
irregularity. She could not afford that 
her nerve should fail her. That gone. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


III 


nothing would remain to her but a wreck. 
But her cherry-water was a pleasant and 
safe calmant, and she knew exactly how 
much to take. 

Her maid saw nothing more to-night 
than she had seen on any other night of 
her service. Her mistress, if not quite 
so sweet to her as to Mrs. Birkett, say, or 
the rector, was yet fairly amiable as mis- 
tresses go, and to-night was neither bet- 
ter nor worse than ordinary. Her at- 
tendance went on in the usual routine, 
with nothing to remark, bad or good; 
and then madame laid her fair head on 
the pillow, and took a tablespoonful of 
her calmant to check the palpitation that 
had come on, and to still her nerves, which 
that last look backward had somewhat 
disturbed. 

How beautiful she looked! Fair and 
lovely as she had always been to the eyes 
of Sebastian Dundas, never had she look- 
ed so grand as now. Her yellow hair 
was lying spread out on the pillow like 
a glory : one white arm was flung above 
her head, the other hung down from the 
bed. Her pale face, with her mouth half 
open as if in a smile at the happy things 
she dreamt, peaceful and pure as a saint’s, 
seemed to him the very embodiment of 
all womanly truth and sweetness. He 
leaned over her with a yearning rapture 
that was almost ecstasy. This noble, 
loving woman was his own, his life, his 
future. No more dark moods of despair, 
no more angry passions, disappointment 
and remorse : all was to be cloudless sun- 
shine, infinite delight, unending peace 
and love. 

“ My darling, oh my love 1” he said ten- 
derly, laying his hand on her glossy gold- 


en hair and kissing her. “ Virginie, give 
me one word of love on your first night 
at home.” 

She was silent. Was her sleep so 
deep that even love could not awake her ? 
He kissed her again and raised her head 
on his arm. It fell back without power, 
and then he saw that the half-opened 
raouth had a little froth clinging about 
the lips. 

A cry rang through the house — cry on 
cry. The startled servants ran up trem- 
bling at they knew not what, to find their 
master clasping in his arms the fair dead 
body of his newly-married wife. 

‘‘Dead — she is dead,” they passed in 
terrified whispers from each to each. 

Learn, standing upright in her room, 
in her clinging white night - dress, her 
dark hair hanging to her knees, her 
small brown feet bare above the ankle 
— not trembling, but tense, listening, her 
heart on fire, her whole being as it were 
pressed together, and concentrated on the 
one thought, the one purpose — heard the 
words passed from lip to lip. ‘‘Dead,” 
they said — ‘‘ dead !” 

Lifting up her rapt face and raising 
her outstretched arms high above her 
head, with no sense of sin, no conscious- 
ness of cruelty, only with the feeling of 
having done that thing which had been 
laid on her to do — of having satisfied and 
avenged her mother — she cried aloud in 
a voice deepened by the pathos of her 
love, the passion of her deed, into an 
exultant hymn of sacrifice, ‘‘Mamma, 
are you happy now? Mamma! mam- 
ma ! leave off crying ; there is no one in 
your place now.” 

I 



-VI. 


CHAPTER XXI. 

CHANGES. 

F I' OUR years had come and gone since 
Mr. Dundas had laid his second 
wife in the grave beside his first, and the 
county had discussed the immorality of 
taking cherry-water as a calmant. For 
it was to an overdose of this that the 
verdict at the coroner’s inquest had as- 
signed the cause of poor madame’s aw- 
ful and sudden death ; though why the 
medicine should have been found so load- 
ed with prussic acid as to have caused 
instant death on this special night, when 
it had been taken so often before with 
impunity, was a mystery to which there 
was no solution. Not a trace of poison 
was to be found anywhere in the house, 
and no evidence was forthcoming to show 
how it might have been bought or where 
procured. Alick Corfield, who under- 
stood it all, was not called as a witness, 
and he told no one what he knew. On 
the contrary, he burdened his soul with 
the, to him, unpardonable crime of false- 
hood that he might shield Learn from 
detection ; for when his father, missing 
the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic 
acid, asked him what had become of it, 
Alick answered, with that wonderful cool- 
ness of virtue descending to sin for the 
protection of the beloved which is some- 
times seen in the ingenuous, “ I broke 
it by accident, father, and forgot to tell 
you.” 

As the boy had never been known to 
tell a falsehood in his life, he reaped the 
reward of good repute, and his father, 
saying quietly, “That was a bad job, 
my boy,” laid the matter aside as 2^ ca- 
put inortman of no value. 

To be sure, he thought more than once 
that it was an odd coincidence, but he 
could see no connection between the two 
circumstances of madame’s sudden death 
and Alick’s fracture of that bottle of hy- 
drocyanic acid ; and even if there should 
II2 


be any, he preferred not to trace it. So 
the inquest was a mere show so far as get- 
ting at the truth was concerned, and ma- 
dame died and was buried in the mystery 
in which she had lived. 

Meantime, Learn had been sent to 
school, whence she was expected to re- 
turn a little more like other English girls 
than she had been hitherto, and Mr. 
Dundas shut up Ford House — he went 
back to the original name^ after madame’s 
death — and left England to shake off in 
travel the deadly despair that had fallen 
like a sickness on him and taken all the 
flavor out of his life. He had never 
cared to search out the real history of 
that fair beloved woman. Enough had 
come to his knowledge, in the bills which 
had poured in from several Sherrington 
tradesmen on the announcement of her 
marriage and then of her death, to con- 
vince him that he had been duped in 
facts if not in feeling. For among these 
bills was one from the local geologist 
for ‘‘a beginner’s cabinet of specimens,” 
delivered just about the time when he, 
Sebastian, had spent so many pleasant 
hours in arranging the fragments which 
madame said represented both her know- 
ledge and her lost happiness ; also one 
from the fancy repository, which sold 
everything, for sundry water-color draw- 
ings and illuminated texts, a Table of the 
Ten Commandments illustrated, and the 
like, which sufficiently explained all on 
this side, and settled for ever the dead 
woman’s claims to the artistic and scien- 
tific merit with which Mr. Dundas and 
the rector had credited her. 

Also, certain ugly letters from a person 
of the name of Lowes, in London, put 
him on the track, had he cared to follow 
it up, of a deception even worse than 
that of pretended art or mock science. 
These letters, written in the same hand- 
writing as that wherein Julius de Mont- 
fort, her brother-in-law, the present mar- 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM EUNDAS. 


quis, had told her of the defalcations of 
the family solicitor and trustee, called 
Virginie, Madame la Marquise de Mont- 
fort, plain Susan bluntly, and reminded 
her of the screw that would be turned if 
the writer was not satisfied ; and were 
letters that demanded money, always 
money, as the price of continued silence. 

But Sebastian had loved his second 
wife too well to seek to know the truth, 
if that truth would be to her discredit. 
He preferred to be deceived ; and he 
had what he preferred. He stifled all 
doubts, darkened all chinks by which the 
obtrusive light might penetrate, kept his 
love if not his faith unshaken, caring 
only to remember her as beautiful, se- 
ductive, soothing, and mourning her as 
deeply, doubtful as she had proved her- 
self to be, as he had loved her fondly 
when he believed her honest. It was a 
curious mental condition for a man to 
cherish, but it satisfied him, and his re- 
gret was not robbed of its pathos by 
knowledge. 

Now that the four years were com- 
pleted, the widower had to return to his- 
desolate home and make the best he 
could of the fragments of peace and 
happiness left to him. Learn was nine- 
teen : it was time for her to be taken 
from school and given the protection of 
her father’s house. It went against the 
man’s heart to have her, but he was 
compelled, if he wished to stand well 
with his friends, and he hoped that the 
girl would be found improved from these 
years of discipline and training, and be 
rational and like other people. Where- 
fore he came home one dry dull day 
in October, and the neighborhood wel- 
comed him, if not as their prodigal re- 
turned, yet as their lunatic restored to 
his right mind. 

During these four years a few changes 
had taken place at North Aston. Carry 
Fairbairn had married — not Frank Har- 
rowby : he had found a rich wife, not in 
the least to his personal taste, but great- 
ly to his profit ; and Carry, after having 
cried a good deal for a month, had con- 
soled herself with a young clergyman 
from the North, whom she loved quite 
as much as if she had never fancied 
8 


Frank at all, and spoilt in the first months 
by such submission as caused her to re- 
pent for all the years of her life after. 

The things of the rectory were much 
in their old state. Little Fina, madame’s 
child, was there under Mrs. Birkett’s 
motherly care ; but as the child was 
nearly six years old now, the good crea- 
ture’s instinctive love for infants was 
wearing out, and she was often heard to 
say how much she wished she could have 
kept Fina always a baby, and, sighing, 
how difficult she was to manage ! She 
was an exceedingly pretty little girl, with 
fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes — willful 
of course, and spoilt of course ; the only 
one in the house who took her in hand 
to correct being Adelaide. And as she 
took her in hand too smartly, Mrs. Bir-, 
kett generally interfered, and the ser- 
vants combined to screen her ; the result 
being that the little one was mistress of 
the situation, after the manner of willful 
children, and made every one more or 
less anxious and uncomfortable as her 
return for their care. 

Alick Corfield was the rector’s curate. 
On the whole, this was the most import- 
ant of all the North Aston events which 
had taken place during the last four 
years. Soon after madame’s death and 
Leam’s transfer from home to school 
Alick had a strange and sudden ill- 
ness. No one knew what to make of it, 
nor how it came, nor what it was, but 
the doctor called it cerebral fever, and 
when the families got hold of the word 
they were content. Cerebral fever does 
as well as anything else for an illness of 
which no one knows and no one seeks 
to know the cause, and to the origin of 
which the patient himself gives no clew. 
It was a peg, and a peg was all that was 
wanted. 

On his recovery he announced his in- 
tention of going to Oxford to read for 
holy orders. His mother was piteously 
distressed, as might be expected. She 
feared all sorts of evil for her boy, from 
damp sheets and unmended linen to 
over-study, wine-parties and bold-faced 
minxes weaving subtle webs of fascina- 
tion. But for the first time in his life 
Alick stood out against her insistance, 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


I14 

and his will conquered hers. The sequel 
of the struggle was, that he went to Ox- 
ford, took his degree, read for orders, 
passed, and that Mr. Birkett gave him 
his title as his curate. 

It could hardly be said that the rela- 
tions were entirely harmonious between 
the military-minded rector, who held to 
the righteousness of helotry and the value 
of ignorance in the class beneath him, 
and the young curate burning with zeal 
and oppressed with the desire to put all 
the crooked things of life straight. The 
one pooh-poohed the enthusiasm of the 
other, derided his belief in humanity and 
assured him of failure : the other felt as 
if he had been taken behind the scenes 
and shown the blue fire of which the 
awful lightning of his youth was made. 
Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the 
greater faith, the more loving endeavor 
which the young man threw into his 
ministrations, but he was the Sadducee 
who scoffed and made the work heavy 
and uphill throughout. H e gave a grudg- 
ing assent to the Bible-classes, the Wed- 
nesday evening services at the Sunday- 
school, the lectures on great men on the 
first Monday in the month, which Alick 
proposed and established. He thought 
it all weariness to the flesh and a waste 
of time and energy; but the traditions 
of his order were strong, if he himself 
did not share them, and he had to give 
way in the end. He consoled himself 
with the reflection that the boy would 
find out his mistake before long, and 
that then he would know who had been 
right throughout. 

But even zeal and hope and diligence 
in his work could not lighten the per- 
sistent sadness which was Alick’s chief 
characteristic now. Gaunt and silent, 
with the eyes of a man whose inner self 
is absent and whose thoughts are not 
with his company, he looked as if he 
had passed through the fire, and had not 
passed through unscathed. No one knew 
what had happened to him, and, though 
many made conjectures, none came near 
the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if 
he lived only -to work, and, the, clearer- 
sighted might have added, to wait. 

For a further local change, Lionnet 


was tenanted again by a strange and 
solitary man, who never went to church 
and did not visit in the neighborhood. 
He was in consequence believed to be 
a forger, an escaped convict in hiding, 
or, by the morQ charitable, a maniac as 
yet not dangerous. North Aston held 
him in deeper horror than it had held 
even Pepita, and his true personality ex- 
ercised its wits more keenly than had 
even the true personality of madame. 
In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffen- 
sive, amiable man, who gave his mind 
to Sanskrit for work and to entomology 
for play, and did not trouble himself 
about his own portrait as drawn in the 
local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all his 
reserved habits and quiet ways, he had 
learnt the whole history of the place and 
people before he had been at Lionnet a 
month. 

At the Hill things remained unchanged 
for the ladies, save for the additional bur- 
den of years and the pleasant news that 
Edgar was expected home daily. Ade- 
laide, now twenty - four, took the news 
as a personal grace, and blossomed into 
smiles and glad humor of which only 
Josephine understood the source. But 
Josephine held her tongue, and received 
the confidence of her young friend with 
discretion. As she had never dispos- 
sessed her own old idol, she could feel 
for Adelaide, and she was not disposed 
to look on her patient determination with 
displeasure. The constancy of the two, 
however, was very different in essential 
meaning. With Josephine it was the 
constancy that is born of an affectionate 
disposition and the absence of rival Lo- 
tharios : with Adelaide it was the result 
of calculation and decision. The one 
would have worshiped Sebastian as she 
worshiped him now had he been ruined, 
a cripple, a criminal even : the other 
would have shut out Edgar inexorably 
from her very dreams had not his per- 
sonality included the Hill. With the one 
it was self-abasement — with the other 
self-consideration ; but it came to the 
same thing in the end, and the men 
profited equalfy. 

All these changes Sebastian Dundas 
found to have taken place when he re- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


turned to North Aston with gray hair 
instead of brown, his smooth, fair skin 
tanned and roughened, and his weak, 
finely-cut, effeminate mouth hidden by 
a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled 
with white. Still, he was Sebastian ; and 
after the first shock of his altered ap- 
pearance had been got over, Josephine 
carried her incense in the old way, and 
found her worship as dear and as tanta- 
lizing as ever. 

Lastly, as the crowning change of all. 
Learn came home from school ; no long- 
er the arrogant, embittered child, look- 
ing at life through the false medium of 
pride and ignorance, saying rude things 
and doing odd ones with the most per- 
fect unconsciousness ; but well - bred, 
graceful, sufficiently instructed not to 
make patent mistakes, and more beau- 
tiful by far than she had even promised 
to be. Her very eyes were lovelier, love- 
ly as they had always been : they had 
more variety of expression, were more 
dewy and tender, and, if less tragic, 
were more spiritual. That hard, dry, 
burning passion which had devoured 
her of old time seemed to have gone, 
as also her savage Spanish pride. She 
had rounded and softened in body too, 
as in mind. Her skin was fairer; her 
lips were not so firmly closed, so rigid in 
line, so constricted in motion ; her brows 
were more flexible and not so often knit 
together ; and her slight, lithe figure was 
perfect in line and movement. Still, she 
had enough of her former manner of 
being for identity. Grave, quiet, laconic, 
direct, she was but a modification of the 
former Learn as they had known her — 
Learn, Pepita’s daughter, and with blood 
in her veins that was not the ordinary 
blood of the ordinary British miss. 

Her father’s artistic perceptions were 
gratified as he met her at the station and 
Learn turned her cheek to him volunta- 
rily with tears in her eyes. Turning her 
cheek was apparently her idea of kiss- 
ing ; but if not too intense an expression 
of affection, it was at least an improve- 
ment on the old hard repulsion, and Se- 
bastian accepted it as the concession it 
was meant to be. Indeed, they met 
somewhat as foes reconciled, or rather 


115 

seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dun- 
das did not wish to keep open old sores. 
Her cheek, turned to him somewhere 
about the ear, represented to his mind a 
peace-offering : her eyes full of tears were 
as a confession of past sins and a prom- 
ise of amendment. Not that he under- 
stood why she was so much more effusive 
than of old, but if it augured a happier 
life together, he was glad. 

As they drove up to the door of the 
old home, crowded with memories and 
associations, a shudder passed over the 
girl : she grasped her father’s hand in 
her own almost convulsively, and he 
heard her say below her breath, “Poor 
papa !” 

He wondered why she pitied him. The 
place must surely be full of memories of 
her mother for her: why did she say 
“Poor papa!’’ to him? He did not see 
what she saw — that peaceful September 
evening, and the bottle of cherry-water 
on the table, with the little phial of thirty 
deaths in her hand ; and now the con- 
tents emptied into the harmless draught ; 
and now madame pale and dead. The 
whole scene transacted itself vividly 
before her, and she shuddered at her 
memories and her past self, as always 
with a kind of vague wonder how she 
could have been so wicked, and where 
did she get the force, the courage, for 
such a cruel crime ? 

For all these four years at school the 
shadow of that dreadful deed had been 
ever in the background of her life ; and 
as time went on, and she came to a bet- 
ter understanding of morality, it grew 
clear to her as a crime. Its conscious- 
ness of guilt had broken down her pride, 
and thus had made her more malleable, 
more humble. She could no longer hard- 
en herself in her belief that she was su- 
perior to every one else. Those girls, 
her companions — they had not had an 
Andalusian mother, truly ; they did not 
pray to the saints, and the Holy Virgin 
took no care of them; they were Prot- 
estants and English, frogs and pigs ; but 
they had not committed murder. If she 
should stand up in the middle of the 
room and tell them what she had done, 
which of them would touch her hand 


ii6 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


again ? which of them speak to her ? 
English and Protestants as they were, 
how far superior in their innocence to 
her, an Andalusian Catholic, in her guilt ! 
But no one lives with remorse. It comes 
and goes gustily, fitfully ; but the things 
of the present are stronger than the 
things of the past, else the man with a 
shameful secret in his life would go mad. 

One of these gusty storms broke over 
Learn as she passed through the gates 
of the old home, and for the moment she 
felt as if she must confess the truth to 
her father and tell him what evil thing 
she had done. Yet it passed, as other 
such storms had passed: the things of 
the present took their natural place of 
prominence, and those of the past sank 
again into the background, shadows that 
never faded quite away, but that were not 
actualities pressing against her. 

The news of beam’s home-coming 
created quite a pleasurable excitement 
in the neighborhood, and the families 
flocked to Ford House to welcome her 
among them as one of themselves, all 
anxious to see if the Ethiopian of North 
Aston had shed her skin, if the leopard- 
ess had changed her spots. They were 
divided among themselves as to whether 
she had or had not. Some said she was 
charming, and like any one else, but 
others shook their heads, and, like ex- 
perts in brain disease, professed to see 
traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubt- 
ful as to her cure. At the worst, however, 
here she was — one of themselves whom 
they must receive; and common sense 
dictated that they should make the best 
of her, and hope all things till they proved 
some. 

There was one among them whom 
Learn longed yet dreaded to meet. This 
was Alick Corfield. She wondered what 
he knew, or rather what he suspected, 
and she was anxious to have her ordeal 
over. But, though Mrs. Corfield came, 
and was just the same as ever, bustling, 
inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes 
were over having put the girl through 
her scholastic facings and got from her 
the whole of her curriculum, yet Alick 
did not appear. He waited until after 
Sunday, when he should see her first in 


church, and so nerve himself as it were 
behind the barrier of his sacred office ; 
but after Sunday had passed and he had 
seen her in her old place, he called, and 
found her alone. 

When they met, and she looked into 
his face and laid her hand in his, she 
knew all. He shared her secret, and 
knew what she had done. It was not 
that he was either distant or familiar, 
cold or disrespectful, or anything but 
glad and reverent; nevertheless, he 
knew. He was no longer the boy adorer, 
her slave, her dog: he was her friend, 
and he wished to make her feel that she 
was safe with him — known, in his power, 
but safe. 

“You are changed,” he said awk- 
wardly. 

He thought of her as Learn, heard her 
always called Learn, but he dared not 
use the familiar name, and yet she was 
not “Miss Dundas” to him. 

“It is four years since you saw me,” 
she said with a grave smile. “It was 
time to change.” 

“But you are your old self too,” he 
returned eagerly. He would have no 
disloyalty done to the queen of his boy- 
ish dreams: what worm soever was at 
its root, his royal pomegranate flower 
should be always set fair in the sun where 
he might be. 

“You seem much changed too,” she 
said after a short pause — “graver and 
older. Is that because you are a clergy- 
man ?” 

Alick turned his eyes away from the 
girl’s face, and looked mournfully out 
onto the autumn woods. “Partly,” he 
said. 

“And the other part?” asked Learn, 
pressing to know the worst. 

“And the other part?” He looked at 
her, and his wan face grew paler. “Well, 
never mind the other part. There are 
things which sometimes come into a 
man’s life and wither it for ever, as a 
fire passing over a green tree, but we do 
not speak of them.” 

“To no one ?” 

“To no one.” 

Learn sighed. No proclamation could 
have made the thing clearer between 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


them. Henceforth she was in Alick’s 
power: let him be faithful, chivalrous, 
loyal, devoted, what you will, she was 
no longer her own unshared property. 
He knew what she was, and in so far 
was her master. 

Poor Alick ! This was not the light 
in which he held his fatal secret. True, 
he knew what she had done, and that 
his young queen, his ideal, was a mur- 
deress, who, if the truth were made pub- 
lic, would be degraded below the level 
of the poorest wretch that had kept an 
honest name ; but he felt himself more 
accursed than she, in that he had been 
the means whereby she had gotten both 
her knowledge and the power to use it. 
He was the doomed if innocent, as of 
old tragic times — the sinless Cain guilty 
of murder, but guiltless in intent. It 
was for this, as much as for the love and 
poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he 
owed himself to Learn — that his life was 
hers, and all his energies were to be de- 
voted for her, good. It was for this that 
he had prayed with such intensity of 
earnestness it seemed to him sometimes 
as if his soul had left his body, and had 
gone up to the Most High to pluck by 
force of passionate entreaty the pardon 
he besought : “ Pardon her, O Lord T 
Turn her heart, enlighten her under- 
standing, convince her of her sin; but 
pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord ! And 
with her, pardon me.” 

The man’s whole life was spent in this 
one wild, fervid prayer. All that he did 
was tinged with the sentiment of winning 
grace for her and pardon for both. In 
his own mind they stood hand in hand 
together ; and if he was the intercessor, 
they were both to benefit, and neither 
would be saved without the other. And 
he believed in the value of his prayers 
and in the objective reality of their in- 
fluence. 

For the final changes in the ordering 
of home and society at North Aston, the 
week after Learn returned Edgar Har- 
rowby came from India, and took up his 
position as the owner of the Hill estate ; 
and the child Fina was brought to Ford 
House, and formally invested with her 
new name and condition as Miss Fina 


117 

Dundas, Sebastian’s younger daughter. 
Mindful of the past, Mr. Dundas expect- 
ed to have a stormy scene with Learn 
when he told her his intentions respect- 
ing poor madame’s child ; but Learn an- 
swered quietly, ‘‘Very well, papa,” and 
greeted Fina when she arrived benev- 
olently, if not effusively. She was not 
one of those born mothers who love 
babies from their early nursery days, 
but she was kind to the child in her 
grave way, and seemed anxious to do 
well by her. 

The ladies all bestowed on her their 
nursery recipes and systems in rich 
abundance — especially Mrs. Birkett, who, 
though glad to be relieved from the hour- 
ly task of watching and contending, was 
still immensely interested in the little 
creature, and gave daily counsel and 
superintendence. So that on the whole 
Learn was not left unaided with her 
charge. On the contrary, she ran great 
risk of being bewildered by her multi- 
plicity of counselors, and of entering in 
consequence on that zigzag course which 
covers much ground and makes but little 
progress. 


CHAPTER XXII. 

EDGAR HARROWBY. 

Thirty-two years of age ; tall, hand- 
some, well set-up, and every inch a sol- 
dier; manly in bearing, but also with that 
grace of gesture and softness of speech 
which goes by the name of polished man- 
ner ; a bold sportsman, ignorant of phys- 
ical fear, to whom England was the cul- 
mination of the universe, and such men 
as he — gentlemen, officers, squires — the 
culmination of humanity ; a man who 
loved women as creatures, but despised 
them as intelligences ; who respected 
socially the ladies of his own class, and 
demanded that they should be without 
stain, as befits the wives and mothers and 
sisters of gentlemen, but who thought 
women of a meaner grade fair game for 
the roving fowler ; a conservative, hold- 
ing to elemental differences whence arise 
the value of races, the dignity of family 
and the righteousness of caste; an he- 


ii8 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


reditary landowner, regarding landed 
property as a sacred possession meant 
only for the few and not to be suffered 
to lapse into low-born hands ; a gentle- 
man, incapable of falsehood, treachery, 
meanness, social dishonor, but not in- 
capable of injustice, tyranny, selfishness, 
even cruelty, if such came in his way as 
the privilege of his rank, — this was Ed- 
gar Harrowby as the world saw and his 
friends knew him, and as North Aston 
had henceforth to know him. 

His return caused immense local ex- 
citement and great rejoicing. It seemed 
to set the social barometer at “ fair,” and 
to promise a spell of animation such as 
North Aston had been long wanting. 
And indeed personally for himself it was 
time that Major Harrowby was at home 
and at the head of his own affairs. Mat- 
ters had been going rather badly on the 
estate without him, and the need of a 
strong hand to keep agents straight and 
tenants up to the mark had been mak- 
ing itself somewhat disastrously felt dur- 
ing the last three or four years. Where- 
fore he had sold out, broken all his ties 
in India handsomely, as he had broken 
them in London handsomely once be- 
fore, when, mad with jealousy, he had 
fled like a thief in the night, burned his 
boats behind him, and, as he thought, 
obliterated every trace by which that 
loved and graceless woman could dis- 
cover his real name or family holding ; 
and now had come home prepared to 
do his duty to society and himself. That 
is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his 
own kind, keep the estate well in hand, 
and set an example of respectability and 
orthodoxy, family prayers and bold rid- 
ing, according to the ideal of the English 
country gentleman. , 

But, above all, he must marry. And 
the wife provided for him by the eternal 
fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. 
Who else could be found to suit the part 
so perfectly ? SheP was well-born, well- 
mannered; though not coarsely robust, 
yet healthy in the sense of purity of 
blood ; and she was decidedly pretty. 
So far to the good of the Harrowby stock 
in the future. Neither was she too young, 
tliough by reason of her quiet country 


life her. twenty-four years did not count 
more to her in wear and tear of feeling 
and the doubtful moulding of experience 
than if she had lived through one Lon- 
don season. She was a girl of acknow- 
ledged good sense, calm, equable, hold- 
ing herself in the strictest leash of lady- 
like reserve, and governing all her emo- 
tions without trouble, patent or uncon- 
fessed. Hers was a character which 
would never floreate into irregular beau- 
ties to give her friends anxiety and crowd 
her life with embarrassing consequences. 
She despised sentiment and ridiculed en- 
thusiasm, thought skepticism both wick- 
ed and disreputable, but at the same time 
fanaticism was silly, and not nearly so re- 
spectable as that quiet, easy-going relig- 
ion which does nothing of which society 
would disapprove, but does not break its 
heart in trying to found the kingdom of 
God on earth. 

All her relations with life and society 
would be blameless, orthodox, ladylike 
and thoroughly English. As a wife she 
would preach submission in public and 
practice domination and the moral re- 
pression belonging to the superior being 
in private. As a mother she would take 
care to have experienced nurses and well- 
bred governesses, who would look after 
the children properly, when she would 
wash her hands of further trouble and 
responsibility, save to teach them good 
manners at luncheon and self-control in 
their evening visit to the drawing-room 
for the ” children’s half hour” before din- 
ner. As the mistress of an establishment 
she would be strict, demanding perfect 
purity in the morals of her servants, not 
suffering waste, nor followers, nor kitch- 
en amusements that she knew of, nor 
kitchen individuality anyhow. Her ser- 
vants would be her serfs, and she would 
assume to have bought them by food and 
wages in soul as well as body, in mind as 
well as muscle. She would give broken 
meat in moderation to the deserving poor, 
but she would let those who are not de- 
serving do the best they could with want 
at home and inclemency abroad ; and she 
would have called it fostering vice had 
she fed the husbandless mother when 
hungry or clothed the drunkard’s chil- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


dren when naked. She would never be 
talked about for extremes or eccentrici- 
ties of any kind ; and the world would 
be forced to mention her with respect 
when it mentioned her at all, having in- 
deed no desire to do otherwise. For she 
was of the kind dear to the heart of Eng- 
land — one of those who are called the 
salt of the earth, and who are assumed 
to keep society safe and pure. She was 
incredulous of science, contemptuous of 
superstition, impatient of new ideas — ap- 
preciating art, but holding artists as infe- 
rior creatures, like actors, acrobats and 
newspaper writers. She was loyal to the 
queen and royal family, the nobility and 
Established Church, bracketing repub- 
licans with atheists, and both with un- 
punished felons ; as also classing im- 
morality, the facts of physiology and the 
details of disease in a group together, as 
^hings horrible and not to be spoken of 
before ladies. She was not slow to be- 
lieve evil of her neighbors, maintaining, 
indeed, that to be spoken of at all was 
proof sufficient of undesirable conduct; 
but she would never investigate a charge, 
preferring rather to accept it in its vile 
integrity than to soil her hands by at- 
tempting to unweave its dirty threads ; 
hence she would be pitiless, repellent, 
but she would never make herself the 
focus of gossip. She was a human be- 
ing if you will, a Christian in creed and 
name assuredly ; but beyond and above 
all things she was a well-mannered, well- 
conducted English' lady, a person of spot- 
less morals and exquisite propriety, in 
the presence of whom humanity must 
not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature 
natural. 

This was the wife for Edgar Harrow- 
by as a country gentleman — the woman 
whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen 
out of thousands to be her daughter-in- 
law, whom his sisters would like, who 
would do credit to his name and position ; 
and whom he himself would find as good 
for his purpose as any within the four 
seas. 

For when Edgar married he would 
marry on social and rational grounds : 
he would not commit the mistake of fan- 
cying that he need love the woman as he 


119 

had loved some others. He would mar- 
ry her, whoever she might be, because 
she would be of a good family and rea- 
sonable character, fairly handsome, un- 
exceptionable in conduct, not tainted with 
hereditary disease nor disgraced by rag- 
ged relatives, having nothing to do with 
vice or poverty in the remotest link of 
her connections — a woman fit to be the 
keeper of his house, the bearer of his 
name, the mother of his children. But 
for love, passion, enthusiasm, sentiment 
— Edgar thought all such emotional im- 
pedimenta as these not only superfluous, 
but oftentimes disastrous in the grave 
campaign of matrimony. 

It was for this marriage that Adelaide 
had saved herself. She believed that 
any woman can marry any man if she 
only wills to do so ; and from the day 
when she was seventeen, and they had 
had a picnic at Dunaston, she had made 
up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. 
When he came home for good, unmar- 
ried and unengaged, she knew that she 
should succeed ; and Edgar knew it too. 
He knew it so well after he had been at 
home about a week that if anything could 
have turned him against the wife carved 
out for him by circumstance and fitness, 
it would have been the almost fatal cha- 
racter of that fitness, as if Fortune had 
not left him a choice in the matter. 

“And what do you think of Adelaide ?“ 
asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when her 
son said that he had been to the rectory. 
“You have seen her twice now : what is 
your impression of her?*’ 

“ She is prettier than ever — improved, 
I should say, all through,” was his an- 
swer. 

Mrs. Harrowby smiled. “She is a 
girl I like,” she said. “ She is so sensible 
and has such nice feeling about things.” 

“Yes,” answered Edgar, “she is thor- 
oughly well-bred.” 

“We have seen a great deal of her 
of late years,” Mrs. Harrowby continued, 
angling dexterously. “ She and the girls 
are fast friends, especially she and Jo- 
sephine, though there is certainly some 
slight difference of age between them. 
But Adelaide prefers their society to that 
of any one about the neighborhood. And 


120 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


I think that of itself shows such good 
taste and nice feeling.” 

‘‘So it does,” said Edgar with dutiful 
assent, not exactly seeing for himself 
what constituted Adelaide’s good taste 
and nice feeling in this preference for his 
dull and doleful sisters over the brighter 
companionship of the Fairbairns, say, 
or any other of the local nymphs.' To 
him those elderly maiden sisters of his 
were rather bores than otherwise, but he 
was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett 
thought differently. If it ‘‘ever came to 
anything,” it would be better that they 
satisfied her than that she should find 
them uncongenial. 

‘‘ She is coming up to dinner this even- 
ing,” Mrs. Harrowby went on to say; 
and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches 
and looked half puzzled if wholly pleased. 

‘‘She is a pretty girl,” he said with the 
imbecility of a man who ought to speak 
and who has nothing to say, also who has 
something that he does not wish to say. 

“ She is better than pretty — she is 
good,” returned Mrs. Harrowby; and 
Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on 
closer ground with his mother, strolled 
away into his private room, where he sat 
before the fire smoking, meditating on 
his life in the past and his prospects in 
the future, and wondering how he would 
like it when he had finally abjured the 
freedom of bachelorhood and had taken 
up with matrimony and squiredom for the 
remainder of his natural life. 

Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett 
appeared. This, too, was one of her 
minor virtues : she was exact. Mind, 
person, habits, all were regulated with 
the nicest method, and she knew as lit- 
tle of hurry as of delay, and as little of 
both as of passion. 

‘‘You are such a dear, good punctual 
girl!” said Josephine affectionately — ^Jo- 
sephine, whose virtues had a few more 
loose ends and knots untied than had 
her friend’s. 

‘‘It is so vulgar to be unpunctual,” 
said Adelaide with her calm good-breed- 
ing. ‘‘It seems to me only another form 
of uncleanliness and disorder.” 

‘‘And Edgar is so punctual too 1” cried 
Josephine by way of commentar)^ 


Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not 
hilariously, only to the exact shade de- 
manded by conversational sympathy. 
‘‘Then we shall agree in this,” she said 
quietly. 

‘‘ Oh I am sure you will agree, and in 
more than this,” Josephine returned, al- 
most with enthusiasm. 

Had she not been the willing nurse of 
this affair from the beginning? — if not 
the open confidante, yet secretly holding 
the key to her younger friend’s mind and 
actions ? and was she not, like all the 
kindly disappointed, intensely sympa- 
thetic with love-matters, whether wise 
or foolish, hopeful or hopeless ? 

‘‘Who is it that you are sure will agree 
with Miss Adelaide, if any one indeed 
could be found to disagree with her?” 
asked Edgar, standing in the doorway. 

Josephine laughed with the silliness of 
a weak woman ‘‘caught.” She looked 
at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her 
quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and nei- 
ther laughed sillily nor looked slyly. 

‘‘ She was praising me for punctuality ; 
and then she said that you were punctual 
too,” she explained cheerfully. 

‘‘We learn that in the army,” said 
Edgar. 

‘‘ But I have had to learn it without the 
army,” she answered. 

‘‘ Which shows that you have by the 
grace of nature what I have attained 
only by discipline and art,” said Edgar 
gallantly. 

Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain 
the compliment. On the contrary, she 
wished to impress it on Edgar that she 
accepted his praises because they were 
her due. She knew that the world takes 
us if not quite at our own valuation, yet 
as being the character we assume to be. 
It all depends on our choice of a mask 
and to what ideal self we dress. If we 
are clever and dress in keeping, without 
showing chinks or discrepancies, no one 
will find out that it is only a mask ; and 
those of us are most successful in gain- 
ing the good-will of our fellows who un- 
derstand this principle the most clearly 
and act on it the most consistently. 

The evening was a pleasant one for 
Adelaide, being an earnest of the future 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


I2I 


for which, if she had not worked hard, 
she had controlled much. Edgar sang 
solos to her accompaniment, and put in 
his rich baritone to her pure if feeble so- 
prano ; he played chess with her for an 
hour, and praised her play, as it deserved : 
naturally, not thinking it necessary to 
make fove to his sisters, he paid her 
almost exclusive attention, and looked 
the admiration he . felt. She really was a 
very pretty young woman, and she had 
unexceptionable manners ; and having 
cut himself adrift from his ties and hand- 
somely released himself from his obliga- 
tions, he was not disposed to take much 
trouble in looking far afield for a wife 
when here was one ready-made to his 
hand. Still, he was not so rash as to 
commit himself too soon. Fine play is 
never precipitate; and even the most 
lordly lover, if an English gentleman, 
thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the 
woman whom he means to take, and 
who he knows will yield. 

And on her side Adelaide was too well- 
bred for the one part, and too wise for 
the other, to clutch prematurely at the 
prize she had willed should be hers. 
Her actions must be like her gestures, 
graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hur- 
ried, and bearing the stamp of purpose 
and deliberation. When Edgar should 
make his offer, as she knew he would, 
she would ask for time to reflect and 
make up her mind. This would be do- 
ing the thing properly and with due re- 
gard to her own dignity ; for no husband 
of hers should ever have cause to think 
that she held her marriage with him as 
a thing so undeniably advantageous there 
was no doubt of her acceptance from the 
first. Every woman must make her- 
self difficult, thought Adelaide, if she 
wishes to be prized, even the woman 
who for seven years has fixed her eyes 
steadily on one point, and has determin- 
ed that she will finally capture a certain 
man and land him as her lifelong pos- 
session. 

Thus the evening passed, with a subtle 
undercurrent of concealed resolves flow- 
ing beneath its surface admiration that 
gave it a peculiar charm to the two peo- 
ple principally concerned — the one feel- 


ing that she had advanced her game by 
an important move ; the other, that the 
eternal fitness of things was making 
itself more and more evident, and that 
it was manifest to all his senses whom 
Providence had destined for his wife, and 
for what ultimate matrimonial end he had 
been shaped and spared. 

A book of photographs was on the table. 

“Are you here?” asked Edgar, lower- 
ing his bright' blue eyes on Adelaide as 
she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrow- 
by’s feet, carrying daughterly incense to 
that withered shrine. 

“Yes, I think so,” she answered. 

He turned the pages carefully — pass- 
ing over his sisters in wide crinolines and 
spoon bonnets ; his mother, photograph- 
ed from an old picture, in a low dress 
and long dropping bands of hair, like a 
mouflon’s ears, about her face ; Fred and 
himself, both as boys in Scotch suits, set 
stiffly against the table like dolls — with 
gradual improvement in art and style, 
till he came to a page where Adelaide’s 
fair vignetted head of large size was 
placed side by side with another, also 
vignetted and also large. 

“Ah ! there you are ; and what a capi- 
tal likeness !” cried Edgar, with the joy- 
ous look and accent of one meeting an 
old friend, giving that gauge of interest 
which we all unconsciously give when 
we first see the photograph of a well- 
known face. He looked at the portrait 
long and critically. “ Only not so pret- 
ty,” he added gallantly. “ Those fellows 
cannot catch the spirit : they give only 
the outside forms, and not always these 
correctly. Here is a striking face,” he 
continued, pointing to Adelaide’s com- 
panion-picture — a girl with masses of 
dark hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, 
heavily fringed with long lashes, and a 
grave, sad face, that seemed listening 
rather than looking. “ Who is she ? She 
looks foreign.” 

Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she 
did not know it by heart. “ That ? Oh ! 
that is only Learn Dundas,” she said with 
the faintest, finest flavor of scorn in her 
voice. 

“Learn Dundas?” repeated Edgar— 
“the daughter of that awful woman ?” 


122 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


“Yes, and nearly as odd as the moth- 
er,” answered Adelaide, still in the same 
cold manner and with the same accent 
of superior scorn. 

“At least she used to be, you mean, 
dear, but she is more like other people 
now,” said kindly Josephine, more just 
than politic. 

Adelaide looked at her calmly, indif- 
ferently. “Yes, I suppose she is rather 
less savage than of old,” was her reply, 
“but I do not see much of her.” 

“ I do not remember to have ever seen 
her : she must have been a mere child 
when I was here last,” said Edgar. 

“She is nineteen now, I think,” said 
Mrs. Harrowby. 

“Not more?” repeated Adelaide. “I 
imagined she was one-and-twenty at the 
least. She looks so very much older than 
even this — five or six and twenty, full : 
dark people age so quickly.” 

“She seems to be superbly handsome,” 
Edgar said, still looking at the portrait. 

“For those who like that swarthy kind 
of beauty. For myself, I do not: it al- 
ways reminds me of negroes and Las- 
cars.” 

Adelaide leaned forward, and made 
pretence to examine beam’s portrait with 
critical independence of judgment. She 
spoke as if this was the first time' she had 
seen it, and her words the thought of the 
moment resulting. 

“There is no negroid taint here,” Ed- 
gar answered gravely. “ It is the face of 
a sibyl, of a tragedian.” 

“ Do you think so ? It is fine in out- 
line certainly, but too monotonous to 
please me, and too lugubrious ; and the 
funny part of it is, there is nothing in 
her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is 
the most profoundly stupid person you 
can imagine.” 

“Not now, Addy : she has wakened 
up a good deal,” again interposed Jo- 
sephine with her love of justice and want 
of tact. 

“But do you not see the mother in 
her, Josephine ? I do, painfully ; and the 
mother was such a horror! Learn is just 
like her. She will grow her exact coun- 
terpart.” 

“A bad model enough,” said Edgar; 


“but this face is not bad. It has more 
in it than poor old Pepita’s. How fat 
she was !” 

“ So will Learn be when she is as old,” 
said Adelaide quietly. “And do you 
think these dark people ever look clean ? 
I don’t.” 

“ That is a drawback certainly,^’ laugh- 
ed Edgar, running through the remain- 
der of the book. 

But he turned back again to the page 
which held Learn and Adelaide side by 
side, and he spoke of the latter while he 
looked at the former. The face of Learn 
Dundas, mournful, passionate, concen- 
trated as it was, had struck his imagina- 
tion — struck it as none other had done 
since the time when he had met that 
grand and graceful woman wandering, 
lost in a fog, in St. James’s Park, and 
had protected from possible annoyance 
till he had landed her in St. John’s Wood. 
He was glad that Learn Dundas lived in 
North Aston, and that he should see her 
without trouble or overt action ; and as 
he handed Adelaide into her carriage he 
noticed for the first time that her blue 
eyes were not quite even, that her flaxen 
hair had not quite enough color, and that 
her face, if pure and fair, was slightly in- 
sipid. 

“Poor, dear Adelaide!” he said when 
he returned to the drawing-room, “how 
nice she is ! but how tart she was about 
this Learn Dundas of yours ! Looks like 
jealousy ; and very likely is. All you 
women are so horribly jealous.” 

“Not all of us,” said Maria hastily. 

“And I do not think that Adelaide is,” 
said Josephine. “She has no cause; for 
though Learn is certainly very lovely, 
and seems touhave improved immensely 
ibr being at school, still she and Addy 
do not come into collision any way, and 
I do not see why she should be jealous.” 

“Perhaps Edgar admired her photo- 
graph too much,” said Fanny, who was 
the stupid one of the three, but on occa- 
sions made the shrewdest remarks. 

Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. 
“That would be paying me too high 
a compliment,” he said. 

Whereat his three sisters echoed “ Com- 
pliment !” in various tones of deprecation. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


123 


and Josephine added a meaning little 
laugh for her own share, for which Ed- 
gar gave her a kiss, and said in a ban- 
tering kind of voice, “Now, Joseph ! mind 
what you are about !“ 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

ON THE MOOR. 

It was a gray and gusty day in No- 
vember, with heavy masses of low-lying 
clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, 
and a general look of damp and decay 
about the fields and banks — one of those 
melancholy days of the late autumn which 
make one long for the more varied cir- 
cumstances of confessed winter, when 
the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow 
suggest the glory of southern skies, and 
the sparkle of the sun on the delicate 
tracery of the frosted branches has a 
mimicry of life, such as we imagine 
strange elves and fairies might create. 

There was no point of color in the 
landscape save the brown foliage of the 
shivering beech trees, a few coarse 
splashes of yellow weeds, and here and 
there a trail of dying crimson leaves 
threading the barren hedgerows. Ev- 
erything was sombre, lifeless, mournful, 
and even Edgar Harrowby, though by 
no means sentimentally impressionable 
to outward conditions, felt, as he rode 
through the deserted lanes and looked 
abroad over the stagnant country, that 
life on the off-hunt days was but a slow 
kind of thing at North Aston, and that 
any incident which should break the 
dead monotony of the scene would be 
welcome. 

He had been thinking a great deal of 
Adelaide for the last four or five days, 
since she had dined at the Hill, and 
making up his mind to take the final 
plunge before long. He was not in love 
with her, but she suited, as has been 
said ; and that was as good as love to 
Edgar, who had now to take up his squire- 
dom and country gentleman’s respect- 
ability, after having had his share of a 
young man’s “fling” in rather larger 
proportion than falls to the lot of most. 
All the same, he wished that her face 


had more expression and that her eyes 
were perfectly straight ; and he wanted 
to see Learn Dundas. 

He had made a long round to-day, and 
was turning now homeward, when, as he 
had almost crossed the moor, athwart 
which his road led, he saw standing on 
a little hillock, away from the main track, 
the slight figure of a woman sharply de- 
fined against the sky. She was alone, 
doing nothing, not seeming to be looking 
at anything — just standing there on the 
hillock, facing the north-west, as if for 
pleasure in the rough freshness of the 
breeze. 

The wind blew back her dress, and 
showed her girlish form, supple, flexible, 
graceful, fashioned like some nymph of 
olden time. From her small feet, arch- 
ed and narrow, gripping the ground like 
feet of steel, to the slender throat on 
which her head was set with so much 
grace of line, yet with no sense of over- 
weighting in its tender curves, an ex- 
pression of nervous energy underlying 
her fragile litheness of form, a look of 
strength — not muscular nor the strength 
of bulk or weight, but the strength ot 
fibre, will, tenacity — seemed to mark her 
out as something different from the herd. 

Edgar scarcely gave this vague im- 
pression words in his own mind, but he 
was conscious of a new revelation of wo- 
manhood, and he scented an adventure 
in this solitary figure facing the north- 
west wind on the lonely moor. 

Her very dress, too, had a character of 
its own in harmony with the rest — black 
all through, save for the scarlet feather 
in her hat, which burnt like a flame 
against the gray background of the sky ; 
and her whole attitude had something of 
defiance in its profound stillness, while 
standing so boldly against the strong 
blasts that swept across the heights, which 
caught his imagination, at that moment 
ready to be inflamed. All things depend 
on times and moods, and Edgar’s mood 
at this moment of first seeing Learn Dun- 
das was favorable for the reception of 
new impressions. 

For, of course, it was Learn — Learn, 
who, since her return from school, alone 
and without companionship, was feverish 


124 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


often, and often impelled to escape into 
the open country from something that 
oppressed her down in the valley too 
painfully to be borne. She had never 
been a confidential nor an expansive 
schoolfellow; not even an affectionate 
one as girls count affection, seeing that 
she neither kisse'd nor cried, nor quar- 
reled nor made up — neither stood as a 
model of fidelity nor changed her girl- 
lovers in anticipation of future inconstan- 
cies — writing a love-letter to Ada to-day 
and a copy of verses to Ethel to-morrow 
— but had kept with all the same quiet 
gravity and gentle reticence which seem- 
ed to watch rather than share, and to be 
more careful not to offend than solicitous 
to win. 

All the same, she missed her former 
comrades now that she had lost them ; 
but most of all she missed the whole- 
some occupation and mental employment 
of her studies. Left as she was to her- 
self, thoughts and memories were gath- 
ering up from the background where they 
had lain dormant if extant all these years, 
and through her solitude were getting 
a vitality which made her stand still 
in a kind of breathless agony, won- 
dering where they would lead her and 
in what they would end. At times such 
a burning sense of sin would flash over 
her that she felt as if she must confess 
that hideous fact of her girlish past. It 
seemed so shameful that she should be 
living there among the rest, a criminal 
with the innocent, and not tell them what 
she was. Then the instinct of self-pres- 
ervation would carry it over her con- 
science, and she would press back her 
thoughts and go out, as to-day, to cool 
her feverish blood, and grow calm to bear 
and strong to hold the heavy burden 
which she had fashioned by her own mad 
deed and laid for life on her own hands. 

If only the ladies had not insisted 
so strongly on mamma’s personality in 
heaven ! if only they had not lighted up 
her imagination, her loyalty, by this tre- 
mendous torch of faith and love ! How 
bitterly she regretted the childish fanat- 
icism which had made her imagine her- 
self the providence of that beloved 
memory, the avenger of those shadowy 


wrongs ! Oh, if she could undo the past 
and call madame back to life ! She 
would kiss her now, and even call her 
mamma if it would please her and papa. 
So she stood on the hillock facing the 
north-w'est, thinking these things and re- 
gretting in vain. 

As Edgar came riding by his large 
black hound dashed off to Learn and 
barked furiously, all four paws planted 
on the ground as if preparing for a 
spring. The beast had probably no ma- 
lice, and might have meant it merely as 
his method of saying, “Who are you?” 
but he looked formidable, and Learn 
started back and cried, “Down, dog! 
go away !” in a voice half angry and half 
afraid. 

Then Edgar saw the face, and knew 
who she was. He rode across the turf, 
calling off his dog, and came up to her. 
It was an opportunity, and Edgar Har- 
rowby was a man who knew how to take 
advantage of opportunities. It was in 
his creed to thank Providence for favor- 
able chances by making the most of 
them, and this was a chance of which it 
would be manifestly ungrateful not to 
make the most. It was far more pic- 
turesque to meet her for the first time, as 
now, on the wild moor on a gusty gray 
November day, than in the gloomy old 
drawing-room at the Hill. It gave a 
flavor of romance and the forbidden 
which was not without its value in the 
beginning of an acquaintance with such 
a face as Leam’s. Nevertheless, in spite 
of the romance that hung about the cir- 
cumstance, his first words were common- 
place enough. “ I hope my dog has not 
alarmed you ?” he said, lifting his hat. 

Learn looked at him with those won- 
derful eyes of hers, that seemed some- 
how to look through him. She, standing 
on her hillock, was slightly higher than 
Edgar sitting on his horse ; and her head 
was bent as she looked down on him, 
giving her attitude and gesture some- 
thing of a dignified assumption of su- 
periority, more like the Learn of the past 
than of the present. “No, I was not 
alarmed,” she said. “But I do not like 
to be barked at,” she added, an echo of 
the old childish sense of injury from cir- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS, 


125 


cumstance that was so quaint and pretty- 
in her half-complaining voice. 

“I suppose not: how should you?” 
answered Edgar with sympathetic en- 
ergy. ” Rover is a good old fellow, but 
he has the troublesome trick of giving 
tongue unnecessarily. He would not 
have hurt you, but I should be very sorry 
to think he had frightened you. To 
heel, sir !” angrily. 

‘‘No, he did not frighten me,” repeat- 
ed Learn. 

Never loquacious, there was something 
about this man’s face and manner, his 
masterful spirit underneath his courteous 
bearing, his look of masculine power and 
domination, his admiring eyes that fixed 
themselves on her so unflinchingly — not 
with insolence, but as if he had the pre- 
scriptive right of manhood to look at her, 
only a woman, as he chose, he command- 
ing and she obeying — that quelled and 
silenced her even beyond her wont. He 
was the first gentleman of noteworthy 
appearance who had ever spoken to her 
— not counting Alick, nor the masters 
who had taught her at school, nor Mr. 
Birkett, nor Mr. Fairbairn, as gentlemen 
of noteworthy appearance — and the first 
of all things has a special influence over 
young minds. 

‘‘You are brave to walk so far alone : 
you ought to have a dog like Rover to 
protect you,” Edgar said, still looking at 
her with those unflinching eyes, which 
oppressed her even when she did not 
see them. 

‘‘ I am not brave, and I do not care for 
dogs. Besides, I do not often walk so 
far as this ; but I felt the valley stifling 
to-day,” answered Learn, in her matter- 
of-fact, categorical way. 

‘‘All the same, you ought to have pro- 
tection,” Edgar said authoritatively, and 
Learn did not reply. 

She only looked at him earnestly. Won- 
dering against what she should be pro- 
tected, having abandoned by this time 
her belief in banditti and wild beasts. 

If his eyes oppressed her, hers half 
embarrassed him.. There was such a 
strange mixture of intensity and inno- 
cence in them, he scarcely knew how to 
meet them. 


‘‘It is absurd to pretend that we do 
not know each other,” then said Edgar 
after a short pause, smiling ; and his 
smile was very sweet and pleasant. 
‘‘You are Miss Dundas — I am Edgar 
Harrowby.” 

‘‘Yes, I know,” Learn answered. 

‘‘How is that?” he asked, ‘‘/knew 
you from your photograph — once seen 
not to be forgotten again,” gallantly — ■ 
‘‘but how should you know me ?” 

Learn raised her eyes from the ground 
where she had cast them. Those slow 
full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a 
startling effect of which she was wholly 
unconscious. Edgar felt his own grow 
dark and tender as he met hers. If the 
soul and mind within only answered to 
the mask without, what queen or goddess, 
could surpass this half-breed Spanish girl, 
this country-born, unnoted, but glorious 
Learn Dundas ? he thought. 

‘‘And I knew you from yours,” she 
answered. 

‘‘An honor beyond my deserts,” said 
Edgar. 

Not that he thought the notice of a 
girl, even with such a face as this, be- 
yond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or 
a goddess had condescended to him, it 
would not have been a grace beyond his 
merits ; but it sounded pretty to say so, 
and served to make talk as well as any- 
thing else. And to make talk was the 
main business on hand at this present 
moment. 

‘‘Why an honor?” asked Learn, igno- 
rant of the elements of flirting- 

Edgar smiled again, and this time his 
smile without words troubled her. It 
seemed the assertion of, superior intelli- 
gence, contemptuous, if half pitiful of 
her ignorance. Once so serenely con- 
vinced of her superiority. Learn was now 
as suspicious of her shortcomings, and 
was soon abashed. 

Edgar did not see that he had troubled 
her. Masterful and masculine to an emi- 
nent degree, the timid doubts and fears 
of a young girl were things he could not 
recognize. He had no point in his own 
nature with which they came in contact, 
so that he should sympathize with them. 
He knew the whole fence and foil of 


126 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


coquetry, the signs of silent flattery, the 
sweet language of womanly self-con- 
scious love, whether wooing or being 
won ; but the fluttering misgivings of 
youth and absolute inexperience were 
dark to him. All of which he felt con- 
scious was that here was something deli- 
ciously fresh and original, and that Learn 
was more beautiful to look at than Ade- 
laide, and a great deal more interesting 
to talk to. 

“ If you will allow me, now that I have 
had the pleasure of meeting you, I will 
see you safe for at least part of your way 
home,” he said, passing by her naive 
query “Why an honor?” as a thing to 
be answered only by that smile of supe- 
rior wisdom. 

Flinging himself from his horse, he 
took the bridle in his hand and turned 
toward home, looking to the girl to ac- 
company him. Learn felt that she could 
not refuse his escort offered as so much 
a matter of course. Why should she? 
It was very pleasant to have some one 
to walk with — some one not her father, 
with whom she still felt shy, if not now 
absolutely estranged; nor yet Alick, in 
whose pale face she was always read- 
ing the past, and who, though he was so 
good and kind and tender, was her mas- 
ter and held her in his hand. This hand- 
some, courteous gentleman was different 
from either, and she liked his society and 
superior ways. And as he began now to 
talk to her of things not trenching on 
nor admitting of flirtation — chiefly of the 
places he had visited, India, Egypt, It- 
aly, Spain — she was not so much abash- 
ed by his unflinching looks and master- 
ful manner. 

When he entered on Spain and his 
recollections of what he had seen there, 
the girl’s heart throbbed, and her pale 
face grew whiter still with the passionate 
thrill that stirred her. The old blood 
was in her veins yet, and, though mod- 
ified, and in some sense transformed, she 
was still Pepita’s daughter and the child 
of Andalusia. And here was truth ; not 
like that poor wretched madame’s talk, 
which even she had found out to be false 
and only making believe to know what 
she did not know. Spain was the name 


of power with Learn, as it had been with 
her mother, and she lifted her face, white 
with its passionate desires, listening as if 
entranced to all that Edgar said. 

It was a good opening, and the hand- 
some soldier-squire congratulated him- 
self on his lucky hit and serviceable 
memory. Presently he touched on An- 
dalusia, and Learn, who hitherto had 
been listening without comment, now 
broke in eagerly. “That is my own 
country!” she cried. “Mamma came 
from Andalusia, beautiful Andalusia ! 
Ah ! how I should like to go there !” 

“ Perhaps you will some day,” Edgar 
answered a little significantly. 

Had she been more instructed in the 
kind of thing he meant, she would have 
seen that he wished to convey the idea 
of a love-journey made with him. 

She shook her head and her eyes grew 
moist and dewy. “Not now,” she said 
mournfully. “ Poor mamma has gone, 
and there is no one now to take me.” 

“ I will make up a party some day, and 
you shall be one of us,” said Edgar. 

She brightened all over. “ Ah ! that 
would be delightful 1” she cried, taking 
him seriously. “When do you think we 
shall go ?” 

“ I will talk about it,” Edgar answered, 
though smiling again — Learn wished he 
would not smile so often — a little aghast 
at her literalness, and saying to himself 
in warning that he must be careful of 
what he said to Learn Dundas. It was 
evident that she did not understand 
either badinage or a joke. But her very 
earnestness pleased him for all its odd- 
ity. It was so unlike the superficiality 
and levity of the modern girl — that hate- 
ful Girl of the Period, in whose existence 
he believed, and of whose influence he 
stood in almost superstitious awe. He 
liked that grave, intense way of hers, 
Which was neither puritanical nor stolid, 
but, on the contrary, full of unspoken pas- 
sion, rich in latent concentrated power. 

“They are very beautiful, are they 
not?” Learn asked suddenly. 

“What? who?” was Edgar’s answer. 

“ Th^ Andalusian women, and the 
men,” returned Learn. 

“ The men are fine - looking fellows 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


127 


enough,” answered Edgar carelessly — 
‘‘a little too brutal for my taste, but well- 
grown men for all that. But I have seen 
prettier women out of Spain than in it.” 

‘‘Mamma used to say they were so 
beautiful — the most beautiful of all the 
women in the world; and the best.” 
Learn said this with a disappointed air 
and her old injured accent. 

Edgar laughed softly. ‘‘ The prettiest 
Andalusian woman I have ever seen has 
an English father,” he answered, with a 
sudden flush on his handsome face as he 
bent it a little nearer to hers. 

‘‘How odd!” said Learn. ‘‘An Eng- 
lish father ? That is like me.” 

Edgar looked at her, to read how much 
of this was real ingenuousness, how much 
affected simplicity. He saw only a can- 
did inquiring face with a faint shade of 
surprise in its quiet earnestness, unques- 
tionably not affected. 

‘‘ Just so,” he answered. ‘‘ Exactly like 
you.” 

His voice and manner made Learn 
blush uncomfortably. She was conscious 
of something disturbing, without knowing 
what it was. She first looked up into his 
face with the same expression of inquiry 
as before, then down to the earth per- 
plexedly, when suddenly the truth came 
upon her : he meant herself — she was the 
prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen. 

She was intensely humiliated at her 
discovery. Not one of those girls who 
study every feature, every gesture, every 
point, till there is not a square inch of 
their personality of which they are not 
painfully conscious. Learn had never 
taken herself into artistic consideration 
at all. She had been proud of her Span- 
ish blood, of her mantilla, her high comb 
and her fan ; but of herself as a woman 
among women she knew nothing, nor 
whether she was plain or pretty. In- 
deed, had she had to say offhand which, 
she would have answered plain. The 
revelation which comes sooner or later 
to all women of the charms they possess 
had not yet come to her; and Edgar’s 
words, making the first puncture in her 
ignorance, pained her more by the shock 
which they gave her self - consciousness 
than they pleased her by their flattery. 


She said no more, but walked by his 
side with her head held very high and 
slightly turned away. She was sorry 
that he had offended her. They had 
been getting on together so well until 
he had said this foolish thing, and now 
they were like friends who had quarreled. 
She was quite sorry that he had been so 
foolish as to offend her, but she must not 
forgive him — at least not Just yet. It was 
very wrong of him to tell her that she 
was prettier than the true children of the 
soil ; and she resented the slight to Spain 
and to her mother, as well as the wrong 
done to herself, by his saying that which 
was not true. So she walked with her 
little head held high, and Edgar could 
get nothing more out of her. When 
Learn was offended coaxings to make 
her forget were of no avail. She had to 
wear through an impression by herself, 
and it was useless to try for a premature 
pardon. 

Edgar saw that he had overshot the 
mark, and that his best policy now was 
absence ; wherefore, after a few mo- 
ments’ silence, he remounted his horse, 
looking penitent, handsome, full of ad- 
miration and downcast. 

‘‘ I hope we shall soon see you at the 
Hill, Miss Dundas,” he said, holding 
her hand in his for his farewell a little 
longer than was quite necessary for good 
breeding or even cordiality. 

‘‘I very seldom go to the Hill,” an- 
swered Learn, looking past his head. 

‘‘But you will come, and soon?” fer- 
vently. 

‘‘ Perhaps : I do not know,” answered 
Learn, still looking past his head, and 
embarrassed to a most uncomfortable 
extent. 

‘‘Thank you,” he said, as if he had 
been thanking her for the grace of his 
life ; and with a long look, lifting his hat 
again, he rode off, just escaping by a few 
hundred yards the danger of being met 
walking with Learn by his sisters and 
Adelaide Birkett. They were all driving 
together in the phaeton, and the sisters 
were making much of their young friend. 

At that moment Edgar preferred to be 
met alone and not walking with Learn. 
He did not stop the carriage — simply 


128 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNE AS, 


nodded to them all with familiar kind- 
ness, as a group of relatives not demand- 
ing extra courtesy, flinging a few words 
behind him as he rode on smiling. Nor 
did the ladies in their turn stop for Learn, 
whom they met soon after walking slow- 
ly along the road ; but Josephine said, as 
they passed, how pretty Learn looked to- 
day, and how much softer her face was 
than it used to be; and Maria, even Ma- 
ria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and was 
quite eulogistic on the object of her old 
disdain. Adelaide sat silent, and did 
not join in their encomiums. 

It would have ‘been a nice point to as- 
certain if the Misses Harrowby would 
have praised the girl’s beauty as they 
did had they known that she had grown 
soft and dewy-eyed by talking of Spain 
with their brother Edgar, though she had 
hardened a little afterward when he told 
her that she was the prettiest Andalusian 
he had ever seen. 

During the dinner at the Hill, where 
Adelaide was one of the family party, 
Edgar mentioned casually how that he 
had met Miss Dundas on the moor, and 
had had to speak to her because of Ro- 
ver’s misbehavior. 

“ Yes ? and what do you think of her ?” 
asked Mrs. Harrowby with a sharp glance. 

“ I scarcely know ; I have hardly seen 
her as yet,” he answered. 

‘‘ Did she say or do anything very ex- 
traordinary to-day ?” asked Adelaide with 
such an air of contemptuous curiosity as 
seemed to him insufferably insolent. 

‘‘ No, nothing. Is she in the habit of 
saying- or doing extraordinary things ?” 
he answered back, arching his eyebrows 
and speaking in a well-affected tone of 
sincere inquiry. 

‘‘At times she is more like a maniac 
than a sane person,” said Adelaide, 
breaking her bread with deliberation. 
‘‘ What can you expect from such a 
parentage and education as hers ?” 

Edgar looked down and smiled satir- 
ically. ‘‘ Poor Pepita’s sins lie heavy on 
your mind,” he answered. 

‘‘ Yes, I believe in race,” was her reply. 

“Mother,” then said Edgar after a 
short silence, “ why do you not have Miss 
Dundas to dine here with Adelaide ? It 


would be more amusing to her, for it 
must be dull ” — turning to their guest 
and speaking amiably, considerately — “ I 
am afraid very dull — to be so often quite 
alone with us.” 

He did not add what he thought, that 
it was almost indelicate in her to be here 
so often. He was out of humor with her 
to-day. 

“ She is such an uncertain girl we nev- 
er know how she may be. I had her to 
stay here once, and I do not want to re- 
peat the experiment,” was Mrs. Harrow- 
by’s answer. 

“But, mamma, that was before she 
went to school, when she was quite a 
child. She is so much improved now,” 
pleaded Josephine. 

“Good little soul!” said Edgar under 
his breath. — “Wine, Joseph?” aloud, as 
his recognition of her good offices. 

“And I like coming alone best, thanks,” 
said Adelaide with unruffled calmness. 
“Learn has never been my friend; in- 
deed, I do not like her, and you all,” to 
the sisters, with a gracious smile and 
prettily, “have always been my favorite 
companions.” 

“Still, she is very lonely, and it would 
be kind. Besides, she is good to look 
at,” said Edgar. 

“ Do you think sp ?” said Mrs. Harrow- 
by with crisp lips and ill-concealed dis- 
pleasure. 

“Do I think so, mother? I should 
have no eyes else. She is superb. I 
have never seen such a face. She is the 
most beautiful creature I have ever known 
of any nation.” 

Adelaide’s delicate pink cheeks turn- 
ed pale, and then they flushed a brilliant 
rose as she laid down her spoon and left 
her jelly untasted. 

There were no trials of skill at chess, 
no duets, no solos, this evening. After 
dinner Edgar went to his own room and 
sat there smoking. He felt revolted at 
the idea of spending two or three hours 
with what he irreverently called “a lot 
of dull women,” and preferred his own 
thoughts to their talk. H e sauntered into 
the drawing-room about ten minutes be- 
fore Adelaide had to leave, apologizing 
for his absence on the man’s easy plea 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


129 


of “business,” saying he was sorry to 
have missed her charming society, and 
he hoped they should see her there soon 
again, and so on — all in the proper voice 
and manner, but with a certain ring of 
insincerity in the tones which Adelaide 
detected, if the others did not. But she 
accepted his excuses with the most ad- 
mirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she 
said, “Oh, we have been very happy, 
Josephine, have we not? though,” with 
a nice admission of Edgar’s claims, not 
too broadly stated nor too warmly allow- 
ed, “ of course it would have been very 
pleasant if you could have come in too.” 

“ It has been my loss,” said Edgar. 

She smiled “Yes” by eyes, lips and 
turn of her graceful head. In speech 
she answered, “Of that, of course, you 
are the best judge for yourself ; but none 
of us here feel as some girls do, lost with- 
out gentlemen to amuse them. We can 
get on very well by ourselves. Cannot 
we, Joseph ?” 

And Josephine said gallantly, “Yes,” 
but her heart was more rueful than her 
voice, and she thought that some gentle- 
men were very nice, and that Sebastian 
Dundas especially made the dull time 
pass pleasantly. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE CHILD FIN A. 

r 

Nothing surprised the North Aston- 
ians more than what it was the fashion 
to call “ the admirable manner in which 
Learn behaved to the child Fina.” If 
the world which praised her had known 
all the compelling circumstances, would 
it have called her admirable then ? Yet 
beyond those natural promptings of re- 
morse which forced her to do the best 
she could for the child whom her fatal 
crime had rendered motherless. Learn 
did honestly behave well, if this means 
doing irksome things without complaint 
and sacrificing self to a sense of right. 
And this was all the more praiseworthy 
in that sympathy of nature between these 
two young creatures there was none, and 
the girl’s maternal instinct was not of 
that universal kind which makes all chil- 
9 


dren pleasant, whatever they may be. 
Hence, she did nobly when she did her 
duty with the uncompromising exactness 
characteristic of her ; but then it was only 
duty, it was not love. 

How should it be love ? Her tenacity 
and reserve were ill matched with Fina’s 
native inconstancy of purpose and child- 
ish incontinence of speech ; her pride of 
race resented her father’s adoption of a 
stranger into the penetralia of the fam- 
ily ; and to share the name she had in- 
herited from her mother with the daugh- 
ter of that mother’s rival seeded to her 
a wrong done to both the living and the 
dead. Naturally taciturn, unjoyful, and 
ever oppressed by that brooding con- 
sciousness of guilt hanging like a cloud 
over her memory, formless, vague, but 
never lifting, Fina’s changeful temper 
and tumultuous vivacity were intensely 
wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was 
forbearing if not loving, and the people 
said rightly when they said she was ad- 
mirable. 

Her grave patience with the little one 
did more to open her father’s heart to 
her than did even her own wonderful 
beauty, which gratified his paternal pride 
of authorship, or than her efforts after 
docility to himself — efforts that would 
have been creditable to any one, and 
that with her were heroic. For Mr. Dun- 
das, being of those clinging, clasping na- 
tures which must love some one, had 
taken poor madame’s child into his af- 
fections in the wholesale manner so em- 
phatically his own, now in these first days 
of his new paternity seeming to live only 
for the little Fina, and never happy but 
when he had her with him. It was the 
first time that he felt he had had a child 
of his own ; and he gave her the love 
which would have been Leam’s had Pe- 
pita been less of a savage than she was, 
and more discreet in the matter of doll- 
dressing. 

The little round, fair-haired creature, 
with her picturesque Gainsborough head 
and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, 
easily amused if easily made cross, di- 
vertible from her purpose if she was but 
coaxed and caressed, and if the substi- 
tute offered was to her liking — without 


130 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNE AS. 


tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of 
things and born of their froth ; loving 
only those who ministered to her plea- 
sure and were in sight ; forgetting yester- 
day’s joys as though they had never been, 
and her dearest the moment they were 
absent — a child deliciously caressing 
because sensual by temperament and 
instinctively diplomatic, with no latent 
greatness to be developed as time went 
on and the flower set into the fruit. Epi- 
tomizing the characteristics of the class 
of which her mother had been a typical 
example, she was the pleasantest thing 
of his life to a man who cared mainly to 
be amused, and who liked with a wo- 
man’s liking to be loved. 

The strong love of children inherent 
in him, which had never been satisfied 
till now, seemed now to have gathered 
tenfold strength, and the love of the 
man, who had never cared for his own, 
for this his little daughter by adoption 
was almost a passion. .If Learn could 
have been jealous where she .did not 
love, she would have been jealous of 
her father and Fina. But she was not. 
On the contrary, it seemed to soften some 
of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and 
she was glad that madame’s motherless 
child was not deserted, but had found a 
substitute for the protection which she 
had taken from her ; for Learn, criminal, 
was not ignoble. 

A few days after the meeting on the 
moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr. 
Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina 
with him. Learn had a fit of shyness and 
refused to go : thus Sebastian had the 
child to himself, and was not sorry to 
be without his elder and less congenial 
daughter. He owned to himself that she 
was good, very good indeed, and a great 
deal better than he ever expected she 
would be ; yet for all that, with her more 
than Oriental gravity and reserve, and 
that look of tragedy haunting her face, 
she was not an amusing companion, and 
the little one was. 

Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his 
old habits again with the Harrowbys. 
He found the patient constancy of his 
friend Josephine not a disagreeable salve 
for a wounded heart and broken life ; al- 


beit poor dear Joseph was getting stout 
and matronly, and took off the keen 
edge of courtship by a willingness too 
manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked to 
be loved, but he did not like to be bored 
by being made overmuch love to. The 
things are different, and most men resent 
the latter, how much soever they desire 
the former. 

Edgar was in the drawing-room when 
Mr. Dundas was announced. He was 
booted and spurred, waiting his horse 
to be brought round. “What a pretty 
little girl !’’ he said after a time. True 
to his type, he was fond of children and 
animals, and children and animals liked 
him. “Come and speak to me,’’ he con- 
tinued, holding out his hand to Fina. — 
“Whose child is she?’’ vaguely to the 
company in general. 

“Mine,” said Mr. Dundas emphatical- 
ly — “my youngest daughter, Fina Dun- 
das.’’ 

Edgar knew what he meant. He had 
often heard the story from his sisters, and 
since his return home he had had Ade- 
laide Birkett’s comments thereon. He 
looked then with even more interest on 
the pretty little > creature in dark -blue 
velvet and swansdown, careless, uncon- 
scious, happy, as the child of a mystery 
and a tragedy in one. 

“Ah !’’ he said sympathetically. “ Come 
to me, little one,’’ again, coaxingly. 

Fina, with her finger in her mouth, 
went up to him half shyly, half boldly, 
and wholly prettily. She let him take 
her on his knee and kiss her without 
remonstrance. She was of the kind to 
like being taken on knees and kissed — 
especially by gentlemen who were strong 
and matronly women who were soft — 
and she soon made friends. Not many 
minutes elapsed before, kneeling upon 
his knees, she was stroking his tawny 
beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling 
his long moustache, playing with his 
watch-guard, and laughing in his face 
with the pretty audacity of six. 

“What a dear little puss !’’ cried Ed- 
gar, caressing her. “Very like you, Jo- 
seph, I should think, when you were her 
age, judging by your picture. Is she 
not, mother?’’ 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


“They say so, but I do not see it,” an- 
swered Mrs. Harrowby primly. 

She did not like to hear about this re- 
semblance. There was something in it 
that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely 
knew why, and the more so because it 
was true. 

“Poor madame used to say so: she 
saw it from the first, when Fina was 
quite a little baby,” said Josephine in 
a low voice. 

She was kneeling by her brother’s side 
caressing Fina. She always made love 
to the little girl : it was one of her meth- 
ods of making love to the father. 

“ Is she like her mother?” asked Ed- 
gar in the same low tones, looking at 
the child critically. 

“A little,” answered Josephine — ^“not 
much. It is odd, is it not, that she should 
be more like me ?” 

Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips 
against Edgar’s, and he kissed her with 
a strange thrill of tenderness. 

“Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so 
to a child before,” cried Mrs. Harrow- 
by, not quite pleasantly ; and on Sebas- 
tian adding with his nervous little laugh, 
which meant the thing it assumed only to 
play at, “ I declare I shall be quite jealous, 
Edgar, if you make love to my little girl 
like this,” Edgar, who had the English- 
man’s dislike to observation, save when 
he offered himself for personal admira- 
tion, laughed too and put Fina away. 

3ut the child had taken a fancy to 
him, and could scarcely be induced to 
leave him. She clung to his hand still, 
and went reluctantly when her stepfather 
called her. It was a very little matter, 
but men being weak in certain directions, 
it delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebas- 
tian beyond measure. 

“ I hope your elder daughter is well,” 
then said Edgar, emphasizing the ad- 
jective, the vision of Learn as he first 
saw her, breasting the wind, filling his 
eyes with a strange light. 

“ Learn ? Quite well, thanks. But how 
do you know anything about her ?” was 
Sebastian’s reply. 

“ I met her yesterday on the moor, and 
Rover introduced us,” answered Edgar 
laughing. 


131 

“How close she is!” said her father 
fretfully. “She never told me a word 
about it.” 

“Perhaps she thought the incident too 
trifling,” suggested Edgar, a little cha- 
grined. 

“Oh no, not at all ! In a place like 
North Aston the least thing counts as 
an adventure ; and meeting for the first 
time one of the neighbors is not an in- 
cident to be forgotten as if it were of 
no more value than meeting a flock of 
sheep.” 

Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a 
man who liked to be amused and who 
lived on crumbs this reserved compan- 
ionship was disappointing and tiresome. 

“ Learn is at home making music,” 
said Fina disdainfully. She had caught 
the displeased accent of her adopted 
father, and echoed it. 

“Does she make much music?” ask- 
'ed Edgar with his hand under her chin, 
turning up her face. 

The child shrugged her little shoulders. 
“ She makes a noise,” she said ; and those 
who heard her laughed. 

“ That is not a very polite way of put- 
ting it,” said Edgar a little gravely. 

“No,” said Josephine. 

“You should speak nicely of your sis- 
ter, my little one,” put in Sebastian. 

Fina looked up into his face reproach- 
fully. “You called it a noise yourself, 
papa,” she said, pouting. “You made 
her leave off yesterday as soon as you 
came in, because you said she made 
your head ache with her noise, and set 
your teeth — something, I don’t know 
what.” 

“ Did I, dear ?” he repeated carelessly. 
“Well, we need not discuss the subject. 
I dare say it amuses her to make music, 
as you call it, and so we need say no 
more about it.” 

“ But you did say it was a noise,” per- 
sisted Fina, climbing on to his knees and 
putting her arms round his neck. “ And 
I think it a noise too.” 

“Poor Beam’s music cannot be very 
first-rate,”* remarked Maria, who was a 
proficient and played almost as well as 
a “professional.” “Four years ago she 
did not know her notes, and four years’ 


132 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM BUND AS. 


practice cannot be expected to make a 
perfect pianiste.” 

“ But a person may play very sweetly 
and yet not be what you call perfect,” 
said Edgar. 

‘‘ Do )'^ou think so ?” Maria answered 
with a frosty smile. ‘‘I do not.” Of 
what use to have toiled for thirty years 
early and late at scales and thorough- 
bass if a stupid girl like Learn could be 
allowed to play sweetly after four years’ 
desultory practice? ‘‘Adelaide Birkett, 
if you will, plays well,” she added ; ‘‘ but 
Learn, poor child ! how should she ?” 

‘‘I hope I shall have an opportunity 
of judging for myself,” said Edgar with 
his company manner. — ‘‘When will you 
come and dine here, Dundas ? — to-mor- 
row ? You and your elder daughter : we 
shall be very glad to see you.” 

He looked to his mother. Mrs. Har- 
rowby had drawn her lips tight, and wore 
an injured air doing its best to be resign- 
ed. This was Edgar’s first essay in do- 
mestic mastership, and it pained her, not 
unnaturally, 

‘‘ Thanks,” said Sebastian. ‘‘ Willing- 
ly, if — ” looking to Mrs. Harrowby. 

‘‘ I have no engagement, and Edgar is 
master now,” said that lady. 

‘‘ And mind that Learn comes too,” said 
Josephine, sharing her favorite brother’s 
action by design. 

‘‘And me,” cried Fina. 

Whereat they all laughed, which made 
Fina cry, to be consoled only by some 
, sweetmeats which Josephine found in 
her work-basket. 

It was agreed, then, that the next day 
Learn and her father should dine at the 
Hill. 

‘‘Only ourselves,” Edgar said, want- 
ing the excuse of her ‘‘being the only 
lady” to devote himself to Learn. It 
was strange that he should be so anxious 
to see her nearer, and in company with 
his sisters and mother ; for after all, why 
should he ? What was she to him, either 
near or afar off, alone or in the inner 
circle of his family ? 

But when the next day came Mr. Dun- 
das appeared alone. Learn had been 
taken with a fit of shyness, pride — who 
shall say? — and refused to accept her 


share of the invitation. Her father made 
the stereotyped excuse of ‘‘headache;” 
but headaches occur too opportunely to be 
always real, and Leam’s to-night was set 
down to the fancy side of the account, 
and not believed in by the hearers any 
more than by the bearer. 

Edgar raged against her in his heart, 
and decided that she was not worth a 
second thought, while the ladies said in 
an undertone from each to each, ‘‘How 
rude !” Maria adding, ‘‘ How like Learn !” 
the chain of condemnation receiving no 
break till it came to Josephine, whose 
patient soul refrained from wrath, and 
gave as her link, ‘‘ Poor Learn ! perhaps 
she is shy or has really a headache.” 

In spite of his decision that she was 
not worth a second thought, the impres- 
sion which Learn had made on Edgar 
deepened with his disappointment, and 
he became restless and unpleasant in his 
temper, casting about for means where- 
by he might see her again. He cast 
about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride, 
reluctance — who knows what? — contin- 
ued with Learn for many days after this. 
If she went out at all, she went where 
she knew she should not be met ; and 
if Edgar called at Ford House, she was 
not to be found. She mainly devoted 
herself to Fina and some books lent her 
by Alick, and kept the house with strange 
persistency. Perhaps this was because 
the weather was bad, for Learn, who 
could bear wind and frost and noonday 
sun, could not bear wet. When it rain- 
ed she shut herself up in her own room, 
and pitied herself for the ungenial skies 
as she had pitied herself for some other 
things before now. 

Sitting thus reading one miserably 
dark, cold, misty day, the child Fina 
came in to her with her lessons, which 
she repeated well. They were very small 
and insignificant little lessons, for Learn 
had a fellow-feeling for the troubles of 
ignorance, and laid but a light hand on 
the frothy mind inside that curly head. 
When they were finished the little one 
said coaxingly, ‘‘Now play with me. 
Learn ! You never play with me.” 

‘‘What can I do, Fina?” poor Learn 
replied. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


^33 


She had never learnt to play when she 
was a child : she had never built towers 
and towns, made railway trains and 
coaches with the sofa and chairs, played 
at giants through the dark passages and 
screamed when she was caught. She 
had only sat still when mamma was 
asleep, or when she was awake played 
on the zambomba, or listened to her 
when she told her of the things of Spain, 
and rnade up stories with her dolls that 
were less edifying than those of Mother 
Bunch. She could scarcely, however, 
unpack that old box full of waxen pup- 
pets, with the one dressed in scarlet and 
black, with fishbone horns and a worsted 
tail, and a queer clumped kind of foot 
made of folds of leather, cleft in the 
middle, that used to go by the name of 
“ El senor papa.” What could she do t 

“Shall I tell you a story?” she then 
said in a mild fit of desperation, for story- 
telling was as little in her way as any- 
thing else. 

“Yes, yes, tell me a story!” Fina 
clapped her chubby hands together and 
climbed up into Beam’s lap. 

“What shall it be about — bears or 
tigers, or what?” asked Learn dutifully. 

“ Tell me about mamma, my own mam- 
ma, not Aunty Birkett,” said Fina. 

Learn shuddered from head to foot. 
This was the first time the little girl had 
mentioned her mother’s name to her. 
Indeed, she did not know that she had 
ever heard of her at all — ever known 
that she had had a mother ; but the ser- 
vants had talked, and the child’s curios- 
ity was aroused. The dead mother is" 
as much a matter of wondering inquiry 
as the angels and the stars ; and Fina’s 
imagination was beginning to bestir itself 
on the mysteries of childish life. 

“ I have nothing to tell you about her,” 
said Learn, controlling herself, though 
she still shivered. 

“Yes, you have — everything,” insisted 
Fina. “Was mamma pretty.^” playing 
with a corner of her sister’s ribbon. 

“People said so,” answered Learn. 

“As pretty as Cousin Addy ?” she 
asked. 

“About.” said Learn, who thought 
neither supreme. 


“ Prettier than you ?” 

“I don’t know: how can I tell?” she 
answered a little impatiently. 

The mother’s blood that ran in her, 
the mother’s mould in which she had 
been formed, forbade her to put herself 
below madame in anything ; but, as she 
was neither vain nor conscious, she found 
Fina’s question difficult to answer. 

“Oh,” cried Fina, in a tone of disap- 
pointment, “then she could not have 
been very pretty.” 

“I dare say she was, but I do not 
know,” returned Learn. 

“And she died?” continued Fina, 
yawning in a childishly indifferent man- 
ner. 

“Yes, she died.” 

“Why? Who killed her ? Did papa?” 
asked Fina. 

Beam’s face was very white: “No, not 
papa.” 

“Did God ?” 

“ I cannot tell you, Fina,” said Learn, 
to whom falsehoods were abhorrent and 
the truth impossible. 

“ Did you ?” persisted Fina with child- 
ish obstinacy. 

“Now go,” said Learn, putting her off 
her lap and rising from her chair in 
strange disorder. “You are troublesome 
and ask too many questions.” 

Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. 
Dundas, from his library below, heard 
her. He came up stairs with his fussy, 
restless kindness, and opened the door 
of the room where his two daughters, of 
nature and by adoption, were. 

“Heyday! what’s all this about?” he 
cried. “What’s the matter, my little 
Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, 
tut! you should not cry like this, dar- 
ling ; and. Learn,” severely, “ you should 
really keep the child better amused and 
happy. She is as good as gold with 
me : with you there is always something 
wrong.” 

Fina ran into his arms sobbing. “ Learn 
is cross,” she said. “She will not tell me 
who killed mamma.” 

The man’s ruddy face, reddened and 
roughened with travel, grew white and 
pitiful. “God took her away, my dar- 
ling,” he said with a sob. “ She was too 


T34 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


good for me, and He took her to live with 
the angels in heaven.” 

‘‘And Leam’s mamma? Is she in heav- 
en too with the angels ?” asked Fina, open- 
ing her eyes wide through their tears. 

‘‘I hope so,” Sebastian answered in an 
altered voice. 

Learn covered her face in her hands ; 


then lifting it up, she said imploringly, 
‘‘Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. 
It is sacrilege.” 

‘‘I agree with you. Learn,” said Mr. 
Dundas in a steady voice. ‘‘We meet 
at the same point, but perhaps by differ- 
ent methods.’ 



'■ ) i/ 





CHAPTER XXV. 

SMALL CAUSES. 

T he frost came early this year; and 
by the second week in December 
the ponds and shallows in the neighbor- 
hood of North Aston were covered with 
ice that made good sliding-grounds for 
the children. Presently it grew and 
spread till the deeper waters were frozen 
over, and a skating-rink was formed of 
the Broad that bore the heavier weights 
without danger. It was a merry time for 
the North Astonians ; and even the elder 
men strapped on their skates and took 
colds and contusions in their endeavors 
to double back on their supple youth and 
to forget the stiffer facts of time. As for 
the young people, they were in the full 
swing of innocent enjoyment; and the 
girls wished that the frost would last 
through the whole of the winter, so that 
they might make up skating-parties with 
the boys every day, and avoid the un- 
meaning deadness of “tender” weather. 

This ice had been in perfect condition 
for three days and the Broad had been 
thronged, but Learn had not appeared. 
All the other young ladies of the country 
had come, Adelaide Birkett one of the 
most diligent in her attendance, for was 
not Edgar Harrowby one of the most 
constant in his ? But though more than 
one pair of eyes had looked anxiously 
along the road that led to Ford House, 
which some people still continued to call 
Andalusia Cottage, no lithe, graceful fig- 
ure had been seen gliding between the 
frosted hedgerows, and Edgar, like Alick, 
had skated in disappointment, the former 
with the feeling of an actor playing to an 
empty house when he made his finest 
turns and she was not ther,e to see them ; 
the latter with the self-reproach of one 
taking enjoyment abroad while the be- 
loved is sitting in solitude and dreariness 
at home. 

At last, on the fourth day, she came 
down with her father; and to at least 

135 


two on the ground the advent of a slen- 
der-waisted girl with dark eyes and small 
feet changed the whole aspect of things, 
and made life for the moment infinitely 
more beautiful and desirable than it had 
been. It was a brilliant day, with as 
fine a sun as England can show in win- 
ter — no wind, but a clear air, crisp, dry 
and exhilarating. Every one was there 
— Edgar, the most graceful of the ska- 
ters ; Alick, the most awkward ; Dr. Cor- 
field, essaying careful little spurts, school- 
boy fashion, along the edges ; and the. 
portly rector, proud to show his past su- 
periority in sharp criticism on the style 
of the present day as a voucher for his 
own greater grace and skill in the days 
when he too was an Adonis for the one 
part and an Admirable Crichton for the 
other, and carried no superfluous flesh 
about his ribs. Among them, too, look- 
ing on the scene as if it was something 
in which he had no inherited share, as 
if these were not men and women to 
whom he was sib on Adam’s side, but 
cunningly contrived machines whose 
movements he contemplated with be- 
nign indifference, was to be seen the 
mild philosophic occupant of Lionnet — 
that Mr. Gryce of whom no one knew 
more than that he studied dead lan- 
guages through the day and caught 
moths and beetles in the twilight, had 
come without letters of introduction and 
was never seen at church ; hence that he 
was a man of whom to beware, and a 
dangerous element among them. The 
pendulum of acceptance, which had 
swung so far on one side in the ungua- 
ranteed reception of Madame de Mont- 
fort, had now gone back to the corre- 
sponding extent on the other ; and no 
one, not even Mr. Birkett as the clergy- 
man, nor Mr. Dundas as the landlord, 
had held out a finger to the new-comer, 
not to speak of a hand ; while all regard- 
ed his presence at North Aston as rather 
a liberty than otherwise. Nevertheless, 


136 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


as time would show, though he had come 
tliere without purpose and lived among 
the people without interest, he would not 
be found without his uses, and one at 
least of the threads making up the skein 
of life at North Aston would be placed 
in his hands. 

As Learn came to the side both Edgar 
Harrowby and Alick Corfield turned to 
greet her, the usually sad face of the 
curate, already brightened by fresh air 
and exercise, brighter still at seeing her, 
the handsome head of the squire held a 
little higher as his figure involuntarily 
straightened and he put out his best pow- 
ers in her honor. But Alick’s shambling 
legs carried him fastest, and he was first 
at the edge, the neighborhood looking on, 
prepared to build a Tower of Babel heav- 
en high on the foundation of a single 
brick. Learn Dundas had not yet been 
fitted with her hypothetical mate, and 
people wanted to see to whom they were 
to give her. 

“Oh, come on with me!” cried Alick 
as soon as he came up, speaking with the 
unconscious familiarity of gladness at the 
advent for which he had watched so long. 
He held out his arm to Learn crooked 
awkwardly at the elbow. 

“No,” said Learn a little shortly. 

She always stiffened when Alick spoke 
to her before folk with anything like inti- 
macy in his manner. He was her good 
friend, granted, and she liked him in a 
way and respected him in a way, though 
he was still too much after the pattern of 
her former slave and dog to gain her best 
esteem. She was one of those women 
who are arbitrary and disdainful to mas- 
culine weakness, and require to be abso- 
lutely dominated by men if they are to 
respect them as men like to be respected 
by women, and as — pace the Shriekers — 
the true woman likes to respect men. 
And Alick, though he had her in his 
hands and might destroy her at a word — 
clergyman, too,^as he was, and thus pos- 
sessing the key to higher things than she 
knew — was always so humble, so subser- 
vient, he made her feel as if she was his 
superior — not, as it should have been, 
that he was hers. In consequence, girl- 
like, proud and shy, she treated him with 


more disdain than she ought to have 
done, and used the power which he him- 
self gave her without much considera- 
tion as to its effect. Besides, she did not 
wish to let people think he knew too 
much of her. With the nervous fancy 
of youth, ever believing itself to be trans- 
parent and understood all through, she 
imagined it would be seen that he had 
the right to speak to her familiarly — 
that he had her in his hand to destroy 
her at a word if so minded. Wherefore 
she said “No” shortly, and turned away 
her eyes as her protest against his glad 
face, crooked elbow and eager offer. 

“ I will not let you fall, and it is very 
jolly,” cried Alick cheerily, more like 
the boyish Alick of former days than the 
ascetic young curate of modern times. 

“I do not like it,” said Learn. 

Alick’s countenance fell; and when 
his face, always loiig, became longer 
still, with a congealed-looking skin, sad, 
red-lidded eyes and a hanging under lip, 
it was not lovely. Indeed, according to 
the miserable fatality which so often 
makes the spiritually best the physical- 
ly worst — like the gods whom the Athe- 
nians enclosed in outer cases of satyrs 
and hideous masks of misshapen men — 
Alick’s face was never lovely. But his 
soul ? If that could have been seen, the 
old carved parable of the Greeks would 
have been justified. 

“Nonsense, Learn! Why cannot you 
do as others do?” cried Mr. Dundas. 

He wanted to get rid of her for a while, 
and he was not unwilling that Alick, 
whose affection he suspected, should rid 
him of her for ever if he cared to saddle 
himself for life with such an uncomfort- 
able companion. 

“I do not like it,” repeated Learn. 

“Nonsense!” said her father again. 
“Other girls are on. Why should you 
not join them ? I see Adelaide Birkett 
and the Fairbairns. Why not go to them 
with Alick ?” 

“It looks silly balancing one’s self on 
the edge of a knife. And I should fall,” 
said Learn. 

“No, you shall not fall,” Alick plead- 
ed. “I will undertake that you shall 
not.” 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


137 


His arm was still held out, always 
awkwardly crooked. 

Learn lifted her eyes. “No,” she said 
with her old calm decision, and moved 
away. Four years ago she would have 
supplemented her refusal by the words, 
“You are stupid. You tease me.” Now 
she contented herself with action and 
accent. 

Alick, very sorry, moist-eyed from dis- 
appointment, but not' caring to stand 
there and get chilled — for our good Alick 
was a little afraid of cold, after the man- 
ner of mothers’ sons in general — skated 
off again to keep up his circulation, his 
knees bent, his chin forward, his arni5 
swinging as balance-weights to his long 
body, the ends of his white woolen com- 
forter flying behind him, and his legs 
running anywhere, the clumsiest and 
most ungraceful skater on the Broad. 
All the same, he never fell, and he went 
faster than even Edgar in his perfection 
of manly elegance. 

Edgar had watched the whole of this 
little scene between Learn and Alick 
while seeming to be occupied only in 
executing his spread eagles and outside 
curves to perfection, and it was no secret 
to him what it meant. The demon of 
masculine vanity, never far off where a 
pretty woman was concerned, entered and 
took possession of him. He would suc- 
ceed where Alick Corfield had failed, and 
Learn, who refused her old friend, should 
gratify her new. He had been guiding 
Adelaide over the ice, but she was rather 
too stiff in her movements, not sufficient- 
ly pliant nor yielding to be a very pleas- 
ant skating companion. And he had 
been pushing Josephine along the slide, 
but Joseph was too stout and short- 
breathed to be an ideal convoy ; also he 
had been racing and half romping with 
the Fairbairn girls, who slipped and tum- 
bled and laughed and screamed — more 
hoydenish than he thought pleasing ; but 
now he intended to reward himself with 
Learn, whose action he was sure would 
be all that was delightful, even though un- 
accustomed, and who would look so well 
on his arm. Her slight and supple fig- 
ure against his breadth and height and 
sense of solidity and strength, her dark 


hair and his beard of tawny brown, her 
large dark eyes and his of true Saxon 
blue, her southern face, oval in shape, 
cream-colored in tint, and his, square, 
open, ruddy, Scandinavian, — yes, they 
would make a splendid pair by their 
very contrast ; and Edgar, narrowing his 
ambition to his circumstances, was quiet- 
ly resolved to win the day over Alick 
Corfield by inducing Learn to cross the 
Broad with him after she had so mani- 
festly refused her old friend. It was but 
a small object of ambition, but we must 
do what we can, thought Edgar; and it 
is the best wisdom to content ourselves 
with mice when we have no lions to 
destroy. He did not, however, rush up 
to her with Alick’ s tactless precipitancy. 
He waited just long enough for her to de- 
sire, and not so long as to disappoint; 
then, speaking to Adelaide by the way, 
and giving her and Josephine each a 
helping hand, he came in a series of 
clean, showy curves to where Learn and 
her father were standing. 

Learn was glad to meet again this 
handsome man who had seen so much 
and who talked so well. He was some- 
thing different from the rest, and so far 
superior to them all. But, not being one 
of those instinctive girls who yield with- 
out pressure and fall in love at first sight, 
there were no flushings nor palpitations 
as Edgar came up ; only a grave little 
smile stole half timidly over her face, 
and she forgot that he had insulted her 
mother’s country by calling her the pret- 
tiest Andalusian he had ever seen. 

“Do you skate. Miss Dundas?” asked 
Edgar after a while, during which he 
had been talking of different matters, 
beginning with the weather, that camel 
of English conversation, and ending with 
the state of the ice and the chances of 
a thaw. His five minutes of common- 
places seemed an eternity to Adelaide, 
watching them jealously from a dis- 
tance. 

“No,” said Learn. 

“ I want her to learn ; and this is a 
good opportunity,” put in her father. 

“You are right. It is a capital exer- 
cise and a graceful accomplishment,’* 
said Edgar. “ I think a woman never 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


138 

looks better than when she is skating,” 
he added carelessly. 

” I think she looks silly,” said Learn. 

He laughed. ‘‘That is because you 
are not pur sang,'' he cried gay- 

ly. ‘‘ If you had only the brave old Norse 
blood in you, you would take to the frost 
and ice like second nature.” 

‘‘No, I am not English pur sang!' 
answered Learn gravely. ‘‘I am more 
than half Spanish,” a little proudly. 

‘‘ Hang it all, you can’t make it more 
than half!” said her father testily. 

‘‘And that makes such a splendid 
combination,” said Edgar, slightly low- 
ering his voice as, ignoring his remark, 
he turned away from Mr. Dundas and 
gave himself wholly to Learn. ‘‘Span- 
ish for art and poetry and all the fervid 
beauty of the South — English for the 
courage, the hardihood, the energy of 
the North. You ought to cultivate the 
characteristics of both nationalities. Miss 
Dundas,” in a louder tone; ‘‘and to do 
justice to one of them you ought to learn 
to skate.” 

‘‘That’s right, Edgar; so I say,” cried 
Mr. Dundas, who had heard only the 
last part. 

‘‘ I cannot learn,” said Learn ; but her 
face became strangely flushed, and she 
felt her resolution growing limp as her 
cheeks grew red. 

‘‘Yes, you can. I could teach you in 
half an hour,” cried Edgar, pulling down 
his coat-cuffs with an air. 

‘‘Go, Learn : let Major Harrowby give 
you a lesson,” said her father. ‘‘Per- 
haps he is a better teacher than that sham- 
bling-looking Alick. Go, child.” 

‘‘Shall 1?” asked Edgar. ‘‘At least 
let me assist you to cross the ice, if with- 
out skates at first.” 

He held out his hand. 

‘‘ I shall fall,” objected reluctant Learn. 

‘‘No, you shall not. I will answer for 
that. Come. Will you not trust me ?” 
This last phrase was said half tenderly, 
half with an offended kind of remon- 
strance, and he was still holding out his 
hand. 

‘‘Go, Learn,” urged her father. 

‘‘It is silly, and I shall fall,” repeated 
Learn. 


Nevertheless, she put her hand in Ed- 
gar’s, and he took her on his arm in tri- 
umph. 

At first her steps were slow and timid ; 
but as her feet grew more accustomed to 
the unusual ground, as she gained more 
confidence in the strong arm that held 
her like a bar of iron, as her youth be- 
gan to assert itself in the physical pleas- 
ure of the fresh air and the gliding move- 
ment, she lost her shyness and timidity, 
and she found herself almost laughing — 
she, who never laughed and only so rare- 
ly smiled. 

‘‘You like it ?” he asked, looking down 
on her with a man’s admiration for a 
pretty woman marked in every line and 
feature. 

‘‘Yes, so much!” she answered, her 
usual reserved, self-centred manner for 
the moment lost. 

‘‘Now you will know how to trust me 
in future,” he said not very loudly. 

She looked up to him, carrying her 
eyes right into his. ‘‘Yes, I will,” she 
answered simply. 

At this moment Alick joined them, 
and Learn suddenly lost her new-found 
joy. 

‘‘ I am glad you have come on at last,” 
said her faithful dog, effacing himself 
and his disappointment with an effort. 

‘‘They made me,” Learn replied. 

‘‘I hope not against your will and not 
to your displeasure,” said Edgar, still 
looking down into her face with the 
man’s admiration of a woman’s beauty 
so strongly marked in his own. 

‘‘No,” she answered: ‘‘I have liked 
it.” 

‘‘Let us take her between us, major, 
and give her a good spin,” said Alick, 
grasping the upper part of her arm un- 
comfortably. 

Edgar slightly pressed the hand he held 
crosswise. ‘‘Would you like to double 
your protectors?” he asked. ‘‘Shall I 
share my office?” 

‘‘No,” said Learn. ‘‘I like best to be 
with one person only.” 

‘‘And possession being the nine points, 
let us go on,” laughed Edgar, whirling 
her away. ‘‘ By the by, would you have 
preferred my giving you to Mr. Corfield 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


139 


as ‘ the one person only’ ?” he asked with 
affected doubt, making pretence of wish- 
ing to know her mind. He was skating 
rapidly now. It was as good as flying 
to Learn, and she was happy and very 
grateful. 

“ I would rather be with you,” she an- 
swered. 

‘‘Thanks !” said Edgar, and smiled. 

‘‘He is awkward, and you are not,” 
continued Learn, anxious to explain. 
‘‘ But I like him very much. He is good 
and kind; and he cannot help being 
awkward, can he?” 

‘‘No,” said Edgar coldly. ‘‘So you 
like him very much, do you ?” 

‘‘Very much,” repeated Learn with 
loyal emphasis. ‘‘ He has always been 
my friend here.” 

‘‘ I hope for the future that I may be 
included in that sacred place,” said Ed- 
gar after a pause. 

Learn looked at him slowly, fixedly. 
‘‘You will never be so good to me as he 
is,” she answered. 

It was the man’s heart that beat now, 
the man’s cheek that flushed. Who 
could keep his pulses still when those 
eyes were turned to his with, as it 
seemed, such maddening meaning? ‘‘I 
will try,” he said ; and from that moment 
the die was cast. Edgar put himself in 
competition with Alick : he lowered his 
pride to such a rivalry as this, and threw 
his whole energies into the determination 
to surpass and supplant a man for whom 
even the least personable of his own sex 
need have had no fear. 

He kept Learn for a long time after 
this, laying ground-lines for the future ; 
forgetting Adelaide and the suitability 
which had hitherto been such an import- 
ant factor in his calculations ; forgetting 
his horror of Pepita, whose daughter 
Learn was, and his contempt for weak, 
fusionless Mr. Dundas, who was her 
father; forgetting the conventional de- 
mands of his class, intolerant of foreign 
blood ; forgetting all but the words which 
said that Alick was her best friend here, 
and doubted his (Edgar’s) ever being so 
good to her as that other had been. It 
was on his heart now to convince her 
that he could be as good to her as Alick, 


and, if she would allow him, a great deal 
better. At last he slackened, and pulled 
up at the group of which the Fairbairn 
girls and Adelaide Birkett were the most 
conspicuous members. 

‘‘What a long skate you have had!” 
said Susy Fairbairn ruefully, for all that 
she was a good-tempered girl and not 
disposed to measure her neighbor’s wheat 
by her own bushel. But this was a spe- 
cial matter ; for Edgar Harrowby was the 
pride of the place, and they took count of 
his doings as of their local prince, and en- 
vied the lucky queen of the hour bitterly 
or sadly according to the mood and the 
person. 

‘‘It was the first time I had tried,” said 
Learn, all aglow with the unwonted exer- 
cise and unusual excitement. 

‘‘I suppose you began by saying you 
copld not and would not, and then did 
more than any one else?” said Adelaide 
in an acrid voice, veiling a very displeased 
face with a very unpleasant smile; but 
the veil was too transparent and showed 
the displeasure with palpable plainness. 

Learn looked at her in a half-surprised 
way. Jealousy was a passion of which 
she was wholly ignorant, and she did not 
understand the key-note. She knew 
nothing of the unspoken affair between 
Edgar and the rector’s daughter, and 
could not read between the lines. Why 
was Adelaide cross because she had been 
a long time upon the ice ? Did it hurt 
her ? They had not been near her — not 
interfered with her in any way : why 
should she be vexed that they. Major 
Harrowby and herself, had been enjoy- 
ing themselves ? So she thought, gazing 
at Adelaide with the serious, searching 
look which always irritated that young 
lady, and at this moment almost unbear- 
ably. 

‘‘ I wonder they did not teach you at 
school that it was rude to stare as you do. 
Learn,” she cried with impolitic haste and 
bitterness. ‘‘What are you looking at? 
Am I changing into a monster, or what ?” 

‘‘ I am looking at you because you are 
so cross about nothing,” answered Learn 
gravely. ‘‘What does it matter to any 
one if I have been on the ice long or 
no ? Why should you be angry ?” 


140 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM FUND AS. 


“Angry !’’ said Adelaide with supreme 
disdain. “ I am not sufficiently interested 
in what you do, Learn, to be angry or 
cross, as you call it. I confess I do not 
like affectation : that is all.” 

“Neither do I like affectation,” return- 
ed Learn. “ People should say what they 
feel.” 

“ Indeed ! That might not always be 
agreeable,” said Adelaide with her most 
sarcastic air. “ Perhaps it is as well that 
the laws of politeness keep one’s mouth 
shut at times, and that we do not say 
what we feel.” 

“It would be better,” insisted Learn. 

“ I wonder if you would say so were I 
to tell you what I thought of you now ?” 
Adelaide replied, measuring her scorn- 
fully with her eyes. 

“Why should you not ? What have I 
done to be ashamed of?” Learn asked. 

“And you call yourself natural and not 
affected !” Adelaide cried, turning away 
abruptly. — “ How wrong,” she said in a 
low voice to Edgar, “turning the head 
of such a silly child as this !” 

Edgar laughed. The vein of cruelty 
traversing his nature made him find more 
amusement than chagrin in Adelaide’s 
patent jealousy : he thought she was sil- 
ly, and he was rather amazed at her want 
of dignity ; still, it was amusing, and he 
enjoyed it as so much fun. 

But when he laughed Leam’s discom- 
fiture was complete. “ I am sorry I came 
on the ice at all,” she said with a mixture 
of her old pride and new softness that 
made her infinitely lovely, the proud lit- 
tle head held high, but the beautiful eyes 
dewy. “ I have offended every one, and 
I do not know why.” Just then Alick 
came rambling by. She held out her 
hand to him. Here at least was her 
friend and faithful follower. He would 
not jeer at her nor laugh, nor yet look 
cross and angry, as if she had done 
wrong. “Take me to papa,” she said 
superbly, making as if to withdraw her 
other hand from Edgar. 

Alick’s homely face brightened like 
the morning. “Certainly,” he said. 

“Certainly not,” flashed Edgar proud- 
ly, taking both her hands in his crosswise 
and grasping them even more firmly than 


before. “You are in my charge, Miss 
Dundas, and I can give you up to no one 
else — not even by your own desire.” 

Adelaide’s slight cast became an un- 
mistakable squint; the Fairbairn girls 
fluttered, half frightened at the chance 
of a fracas ; Alick looked irresolute ; Ed- 
gar looked haughty and displeased ; Learn 
tragic and proud, partly bewildered, part- 
ly distressed. 

Then Edgar cut the whole thing short 
by taking her away in silence, but like a 
whirlwind, saying, when half over the 
ground and well out of hearing, “What 
have I done to you, Miss Dundas, that 
you should try to throw me over like 
that ?” 

“You laughed at me,” said Learn. 

V Laughed at you ? You are dreaming.” 

“You did,” she persisted. 

“ Pardon me : I laughed because my 
little friend Adelaide was so cross at your 
skating. It was fun to see her so angry.” 

“I saw no fun in it,” Learn returned. 
“ I only saw that she was angry with 
me, and impertinent, and that then you 
laughed at me.” 

“ I swear to you I did not,” cried Ed- 
gar earnestly. “Will you believe me? 
Tell me. Miss Dundas, that you exon- 
erate me from such a charge. Tell me 
that you are sure I did not laugh at you.” 

Learn looked at him with her large lu- 
minous eyes serious, questioning. “ If 
you say so, I must believe you,” she 
answered slowly, “but I thought you 
did.” 

“If you could read my heart, you w^ould 
know I did not,” he said emphatically. 

They were close on the bank now, 
where Mr. Dundas was walking with the 
rector. 

“Say you believe me,” Edgar almost 
whispered in his rich musical voice, so 
sweet and tender. “Say it, I beseech 
you ! You do not know how I shall 
suffer else.” 

She looked at him again. “ I do,” she 
said in the manner of a surrender, the 
grave little smile which was her most 
eloquent expression of pleasure stealing 
over her face. 

“Thank you,” said Edgar: “now you 
have made me happy.” 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


“I do not understand why,” she an- 
swered with serious simplicity. 

“Perhaps you will some day,” he re- 
plied as her father came down to receive 
her, rather more content with her than 
he usually was, seeing that Edgar Har- 
rowby — Major Harrowby, the possessor 
of the Hill and some thousands a year 
— had singled her out for his special 
attention, and had made a picture on 
the ice almost as pretty as an illustrated 
weekly. 

But Edgar, not wishing to go too far 
in the way of provocation, nor to burn 
his boats behind him before he had de- 
cided on his settlement, skated off to 
Adelaide so soon as he had deposited 
Learn, and by a few judicious praises 
and well - administered tendernesses of 
voice and look succeeded in bringing 
her back to her normal condition of 
quiescent resolve and satisfaction. Then, 
when she was her smiling self again — for 
if she had frowns for many others, she 
had always smiles for the Harrowbys as 
a race, and specially for Edgar as an in- 
dividual — he said, in the manner of one 
wishing to know the truth of a thing, 
“What made you so savage to Miss 
Dundas just now?” 

“I cannot bear her,” said Adelaide 
with energy. 

“No, I see that you dislike her; but 
why ?” 

“ I can hardly tell you she has never 
done anything very bad, but I always 
feel as if she could, she is so silent, so 
reserved, so odd altogether.” 

“A woman’s reason!” he laughed. 
“Dr. Fell over again.” 

“It may be,” returned Adelaide cold- 
ly, “but I believe in my own instinctive 
dislikes. I felt the same kind of mistrust 
for that wretched woman who called her- 
self Madame de Montfort, about whom 
papa and mamma and the whole place 
went mad. And after her death quite 
odd-enough stories came out to justify 
my doubts and condemn her faithful 
friends. Every one said she poisoned 
herself because she knew that she would 
be unmasked and she was afraid to face 
the ordeal. And her debts, I believe, 
were frightful ; though it served that 


141 

ridiculous Mr. Dundas right for marry- 
ing such a creature.” 

“ But granting that this woman was an 
adventuress, as you say, what has that 
to do with Miss Pundas ?” 

“Nothing, of course: I only mention- 
ed her to show you that I have some ac- 
curacy of judgment, and that when I say 
1 dislike Learn Dundas my opinion ought 
to be taken as worth consideration.” 

Adelaide said this quietly, in the well- 
bred but absolutely positive manner 
which she would have when they were 
married and she differed from him in 
opinion. It was the moral arbitrariness 
of the superior being, which, amusing now 
in the maiden, might become wearisome, 
not to say oppressive, in the wife. 

“ Well, I do not know her as you do, of 
course, but I cannot see why you should 
dislike her so much,” persisted Edgar. 

“Trust me, some day it will be seen 
why,” she answered. “ I feel confident 
that before long Learn will show herself 
in her true colors, and those will be black. 
I pity the man who will ever be her hus- 
band.” 

Edgar laughed somewhat forcedly, then 
looked at Learn walking up the road alone, 
and thought that her husband would not 
need much pity for his state. Her beau- 
ty stood with him for moral qualities and 
intellectual graces. Given such a face 
as hers, such a figure, and all the rest 
was included. And when he thought of 
her eyes and the maddening way in which 
they looked into his ; of the grave little 
smile, evanescent, delicate, subtle, the 
very aroma of a smile, so different from 
the coarse hilarity of your commonplace 
English girls ; of the reticence and pride 
which gave such value to her smaller 
graces ; of the enchanting look and ac- 
cent which had accompanied her act of 
self-surrender just now — that acceptance’ 
of his word and renunciation of her own 
fancy which had put him in the place and 
given him the honor of a conqueror, — he 
accused Adelaide in his heart of prejudice 
and jealousy, and despised her for her lit- 
tleness. In fact, he was nearer to loving 
Learn Dundas because of these strictures 
than he would have been had the rector’s 
daughter praised her; and Adelaide, 


142 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


usually so politic, had made a horribly 
bad move by her unguarded confession 
of distrust and dislike. 

The whole episode, however, had been 
lost in its true meaning to all save one — 
that one the Mr. Gryce of Lionnet, who 
already knew what there was to be known 
of every family in the place, and who 
had the faculty of dovetailing parts into a 
whole characteristic of the born detective. 


CHAPTER XXVL 
THE GREEN YULE. 

The frost broke suddenly, and was 
succeeded by damp, close, unseasonable 
weather, continuing up to Christmas, and 
giving the “green yule” which the pro- 
verb says “makes a fat churchyard.” 
That proverb was justified sadly enough 
at North Aston, for typhus set in among 
the low-lying cottages, and, as in olden 
times, when jail-fever struck the lawyer at 
the bar and the judge on the bench in stern 
protest against the foulness they fostered, 
so now the sins of the wealthy landlords 
in suffering such cottages as these in the 
bottom to exist reacted on their own class, 
and the fever entered other dwellings be- 
side those of the peasants. 

Two of the gentry were struck down 
by it — Alick Corfield and the new occu- 
pant of Lionnet, that Mr. Gryce who 
never went to church, and who was as- 
sumed in consequence to have neither a 
soul to be saved by God nor a heart to 
be touched by man. And these were 
just the two who, according to the theory 
of the good or evil of a man’s deeds re- 
turned to him in kind, had the most rea- 
son to expect exemption. For Alick had 
spent his strength in visiting the sick as 
a faithful pastor should, and Mr. Gryce 
had taken them material help with royal 
abundance. Both together they had to 
pay the price of principle, always an ex- 
pensive luxury, and never personally so 
safe a card to play in the game of life as 
selfishness. For virtue has not only to 
be contented with its own reward, as we 
constantly hear, but has to accept pun- 
ishment for its good deeds, vice for the 
most part carrying off the blue ribbons 


and the gold medals, while poor virtue, 
shivering in the corner, gets fitted with 
the fool’s cap or is haled into the market- 
place to be pelted in the pillory. As was 
seen now in North Aston. 

The rector, who never -went into an 
infected cottage nor suffered a parish- 
ioner to stand between the wind and his 
security, kept his portly strength and 
handsome flesh intact, but Alick nearly 
lost his life as the practical comment on 
his faithful ministry ; and Mr. Gryce, who, 
if he did not carry spiritual manna where- 
with to feed hungry souls, did take qui- 
nine and port wine, money and comfort- 
ing substances generally, for half-starved 
aching bodies, was also laid hold of by 
that inexorable law which knows noth- 
ing about providential immunities from 
established consequences on account of 
the good motives of the actors. This 
would have been called heresy by the 
North Astonian families, who professed 
to trust themselves to superior care, but 
none the less used Condy’s Fluid as a 
means whereby the work of Providence 
might be rendered easier to it, nor dis- 
dained precipitate flight from the protec- 
tion in which they all said dolefully they 
believed. But there is a wide difference 
between saying and doing, and men who 
are shocked by words of frank unbelief 
find faithless deeds both natural and in 
reason. 

In spite, then, of that expressed trust 
in Providence which is part of the garni- 
ture of English respectability, a great fear 
fell on the North Aston gentry when these 
two of their own circle were attacked. 
The fever, while it had confined itself to 
the ill-drained, picturesque little cottages 
below, was lamentable enough, but not 
more than lamentable on the broad plat- 
form of a common humanity ; and those 
who had lost nothing told those who had 
lost all that they must bear their cross 
with patience, seeing that it was the di- 
vine will that it should be so. Now, 
when the fiery epidemic had come upon 
the gentry face to face in their homes, it 
was a monster from which they must flee 
without delay, for no one knew whose 
house was safe, nor for how long his own 
might remain uninfected. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


143 


Mrs. Harrowby and her daughters went 
off to Cheltenham two days after Alick 
was announced as “down,” to find there 
the security of living which had failed 
^ them here. They were people of the 
highest respectability — people who are 
the very pith and marrow of English 
social virtue; but they had not been 
touched with the divine fire of self-sac- 
rifi-ce for humanity, and they had no 
desire to hush the groans of the afflicted 
if they thereby ran the risk of having to 
gnash their own teeth. They could do 
no good at home. As Mrs. Harrowby 
said, as one propounding a self-evident 
paradox, how could they go and see the 
sick or help to nurse ploughmen and 
their children ? They would only catch 
the fever themselves, and so spread it 
still farther. And every one knows what 
a wicked thing that is to do. Cook had 
orders to supply a certain amount of soup 
and wine when asked for, which was 
more to the purpose than any mere sen- 
timental kindness, of no use to the one 
and highly dangerous to tbs' other ; and 
as Edgar had a great deal to do in the 
house and stables, it was as well, she 
said with the air of one undergoing some- 
thing disagreeable for high principles, to 
get out of his way and leave him to his 
bricks and mortar undisturbed. Gentle- 
men, she said, as the clamp holding all 
together, do not like to be interfered with 
in their own domain. That fever in the 
bottom was such an admirable lever of 
womanly good sense ! So they went and 
enjoyed themselves at Cheltenham as 
much as it was in the Harrowby nature 
to do, and even Josephine’s kind heart 
consoled itself in the Pump-room while 
their miserable tenants at home sickened 
and died as comfortably as circumstances 
would allow. 

The Fairbairns, too, found themselves 
obliged to pay a long-promised visit to 
London now on the instant, and swept 
out of the place with even more than 
their characteristic promptitude ; and the 
rector would have given up his charge to 
a substitute if he could. But floating 
clerical labor was just then scarce, and 
he could not find any one to take his 
place in the Valley of the Shadow, though I 


he offered the liberal terms which are 
dictated by fear. He sent away his wife 
and daughter, but he himself was bound 
to his post, and had to make the best of 
the bad bit of cord that held him. He 
used to say with his grand manner of 
martyrdom that, whatever he suffered, he 
must pull the laboring-oar to the end, 
and attend to the sheep committed to 
his charge. And he said it so often that 
he got at last to believe in his own devo- 
tion. All the same, that laboring-oar of 
his pulled nothing heavier than a cock- 
boat, and in waters no stormier than a 
duck-pond ; and when his sheep had the 
rot he was too delicate about the hands 
to meddle with them. He preached to 
the living and he buried the dead sur- 
rounded by all the protective appliances 
that science has devised or money can 
supply. When the epidemic was over he 
too talked of Providence and his trust 
therein, and how he had been mercifully 
spared as his reward. 

Mrs. Birkett’s native indolence would 
have kept her at home, well fumigated 
and isolated, even in such a strait of fear 
and danger as this in which they all were, 
and Adelaide was racked with torment at 
leaving Learn unwatched and unhindered 
in the same place as Edgar ; yet, being 
more afraid of the fever than even of a 
potential rival, she agreed with her father 
that in justice to themselves they ought 
to go now at once ; and Pace, who was to 
remain to take care of the rector, packed 
* up their best dresses, and sent them off 
with Adelaide’s maid shared between 
them. She prophesied, however, that 
their things would all be spoiled before 
they returned, and then they would know 
her value. As Mr. Dundas elected to re- 
main at home, not being afraid of infec- 
tion and being tired of travel, Mrs. Bir- 
kett insisted on taking little Fina with 
her. This was her contribution to the 
sum of philanthropy and self-sacrifice in 
the world, and it was not despicable ; for 
Fina was restless and only six years of 
age, and Mrs. Birkett was indolent and 
soon tired. 

Thus, the whole society of the place 
was reduced now to the rector, Mr. Dun- 
das and Learn, with Edgar Harrowby left 


ft 


144 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


alone at the Hill. The Corfields did not 
count, because of Alick’s illness, by which 
they were put in quarantine ; and if Mr. 
Gryce at Lionnet had not been the cipher 
he was, his illness too would have dis- 
barred him. 

There was nothing of the saint by na- 
ture nor of the instinctive philanthropist 
about Learn. She was too concentrated 
for general benevolence, and men and 
women whom she did not know were 
little more than symbols to her. When 
she loved it was with her whole heart, 
her whole being; failing this kind of 
love, she had but weak affections and 
no curiosity, in which much of our ordi- 
nary charity consists. When the ser- 
vants told her of such and such distress- 
ing circumstances, she was sorry because 
they were sorry, not because she realized 
in her own emotions the troubles she did 
not share or see. When prompted she 
sent improper things in the way of diet 
and useless things in the way of dress 
for the benefit of the poor fever patients 
— and she sent generously — but it nev- 
er occurred to her as possible that she 
should go to see them in their own homes. 
When we read of a cyclone in China 
which has killed half a hundred man- 
darins and a small army of coolies, we 
realize the sorrow of the survivors no 
more than we realize the distress of a 
disturbed ant-hill; and beam’s attitude 
of mind toward the poor of her native 
village was precisely the same as ours 
toward the Chinese killed in a cyclone 
or the ants murdered in their hill. 

But she went daily to Steel’s Corner, 
because she knew the Corfields and in 
her own way liked Alick. Mrs. Corfield 
assured her there was no danger, not a 
particle, with her free use of disinfect- 
ants and her cunning devices of ventila- 
tion. And Learn believed her, and act- 
ed on her belief, which gave her a false 
look of heroism and devotion that won 
the heart of poor Pepita’s “ crooked stick” 
for ever. She thought it so good of the 
girl, so brave and unselfish ; and you 
could scarcely have expected such nice 
feeling from Learn, now could you ? she 
used to ask her husband half a dozen 
times a day, ringing the changes on 


beam’s good qualities as no one in the 
place had ever rung them before, and 
disturbing the poor doctor in his calcula- 
tions on the varying strength of henbane 
and aconite till he wished that Learn 
Dundas had never been born. Mrs. 
Corfield was just as wrong in ascribing 
heroic qualities to the girl for her daily 
visits to ask after Alick as she had been 
when she had credited her with moral 
faults because of her intellectual igno- 
rance. She was hot afraid because she 
knew nothing about infection, and had 
therefore the boldness of ignorance, and 
she went daily to ask after Alick because 
she somehow slipped into the grpove of 
doing so ; and a groove was a great thing 
to conservative Learn. Nevertheless, she 
was really concerned at the illness of her 
first North Astonian friend, and wished 
that he would soon get well. She never 
thought that if he died she would be rid 
of the only person who knew her deadly 
secret. Learn was not one who would 
care to buy her own safety at the price 
of another’s destruction ; and, more than 
this, she was not afraid that Alick would 
betray her. 

This, then, was the condition of things 
at North Aston at this moment : the vil- 
lagers dying of fever in the bottom, the 
families seeking safety in flight. Learn 
going daily to Steel’s Corner to ask after 
Alick and sit for precisely half an hour 
with Mrs. Corfield, and Edgar not so 
much taken up with bricks and mortar 
as not to understand times and habits, 
and therefore, through that understand- 
ing, seeing her for some part of every 
day. And the more he saw of her the 
more he yearned to see, and the stronger 
grew her strange fascination over him. 
To him, at least, the fever had not been 
an unmitigated evil ; and though he was 
sometimes inclined to quarrel with the 
fact that Learn went daily to Steel’s Cor- 
ner to inquire after Alick Corfield, yet, 
as he got the grain and Alick only the 
husk, he submitted to the process by 
which the best was winnowed to his side. 
As the gain of that winnowing process 
became more evident he grew philosoph- 
ically convinced that nothing is so charm- 
ing in a woman as faithful friendship for 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


145 


a sick man, and that sitting daily for 
half an hour, always at exactly the same 
time, with an afflicted mother is the most 
delightful act of charity to be imagined. 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

IN THE BALANCE. 

Riding was one of the accomplish- 
ments brought by Learn from school, 
though she had never been able to thor- 
oughly conquer either her timidity or her 
reluctance. Her childish days of inac- 
tion and seclusion had left their mark 
on her for life, and, moreover, she was 
not of the race or kind whence, by any 
process of education possible, could have 
been evolved a girl of the florid, fearless, 
energetic kind usually held as the type 
of the English maiden. Hence she was 
never quite happy on horseback, and 
always wondered how it was that people 
could be enthusiastic about riding. Nev- 
ertheless, she had learnt to sit with grace, 
if not with confidence, and sheT was too 
proud to show the discomfort she felt. 
Her father had bought for her use the 
showiest chestnut to be had in the mar- 
ket ; and as he wished her to ride some- 
times with him, if oftener with only the 
groom at her heels, and as, again, she 
had honestly set herself to please him, 
she used to mount her Red Coat, as she 
called her beast, punctually every other 
day, and carry her dislike to the exercise 
as the penance it was fitting she should 
perform. And besides all this, that de- 
vouring fever in her blood, that oppres- 
sive consciousness rather than active re- 
membrance, lying always at the back of 
her life, was best soothed by long hours 
alone in the open air. For when she 
had only the groom behind her. Learn — 
to whom all men were as yet powers un- 
desighated, and a man of low degree a 
mere animal that made intelligible sounds 
on occasions and was of a little more use 
than a dog — forgot him altogether, and 
was as much alone as if he had not been 
there. 

Once or twice before the hegira of the 
gentry she had chanced to meet Major 
Harrowby in her rides, and he had turn- 
10 


ed with her and accompanied her, which 
was half a pain to Learn and half a 
pleasure. The pain was connected with 
her reins and her stirrups, her saddle 
and the girths, the restless way in which 
the chestnut moved his ears, the discom- 
posing toss of his small impatient head, 
the snorts which frightened her as the 
heralds of an outbreak, and his inclina- 
tion to dance sideways into the hedge 
rather than walk discreetly in the middle 
of the road, whereby her seat was dis- 
turbed and her courage tried, she all the 
while not liking to show that she was 
ill at ease. The pleasure was personal, 
arising from the strange sense of protec- 
tion that she felt in Edgar’s society and 
the charming way in which he talked to, 
her. He had seen a great deal, and he 
had a facile tongue, and between fact and 
color, memory and make-up, his stories 
were delightful. Also, after the manner 
of men who seek to influence a young 
girl’s mind and heart, he lent her books 
to read, and he marked his favorite pas- 
sages, which he discussed afterward. 
They were not passages of abstract 
thought and impersonal sentiment, like 
the penciled notes in Alick Corfield’s lit- 
erary loans, but scenes of passion or of 
pathos, going straight to the heart of 
youth, which feels rather than reflects, or 
descriptions of places which were equal 
to pictures of human life. Under Alick’s 
guidance she had fallen asleep over 
Wordsworth — under Edgar’s she dream- 
ed beneath the stars over Byron, and had 
heartaches without knowing why. 

If they had met sometimes, and by 
chance, before the families went away, 
they met now continually, and not by 
chance. But as Edgar’s passion and 
reason were not in accord, he restrained 
himself, for him marvelously, and nei- 
ther made love to her in earnest nor flirt- 
ed with her in jest. Indeed, Learn was 
too intense to be approached at any time 
with levity. As well dress the Tragic 
Muse in the costume of a Watteau shep- 
herdess as ply Learn Dundas with the 
pretty follies found so useful with other 
women. She did not understand them, 
and it seemed useless to try to make her. 
If Edgar paid her any of the trivial com- 


146 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


pliments always on his lips for women, 
Learn used to look at him with her seri- 
ous eyes and ask him how could he pos- 
sibly know what she was like — he, who 
scarcely knew her at all. If he praised 
her beauty, she used to turn away her 
head offended and tell him he was rude. 
He felt as if he could never touch her, 
never hold her : his ways were not as 
hers ; and if her fascination for him in- 
creased, so did his trouble. 

He was in doubt on both sides — for 
her and for hiijiself. He could not read 
that silent, irresponsive nature nor meas- 
ure his influence over her. By no blushes 
when they met, no girlish poutings when 
he kept away, by no covert reproaches, 
no ill-concealed gladness, no tremors and 
no consciousness could he gain the small- 
est clew to guide him. She was always 
the same — grave, gentle, laconic, self- 
possessed. But who that looked into 
her eyes could fail to see underneath 
her Spanish pride and more than Ori- 
ental reserve that fund of passion lying 
hidden like the waters of an artesian 
well, waiting only to be brought to the 
surface ? He had not yet brought that 
hidden treasure into the light of the sun 
and of love, and he wondered if ever he 
should. And if he should, would it be 
for happiness ? Learn was the kind of 
girl to love madly under the orange trees 
and myrtles, to break one’s heart for 
when brothers interposed in the moon- 
light with rapiers and daggers and caught 
her away for conventual discipline or for 
marriage with the don ; but as the mis- 
tress of an English home, the every-day 
wife of an English squire with a charac- 
ter to keep up and an example to set, 
was she fit for that ? She was so quaint, 
so original, there were such depths of 
passionate thought and feeling side by 
side with such strange shallows of social 
and intellectual ignorance — though reti- 
cent she was so direct, though tenacious 
so simple, her love, if difficult to win, had 
such marvelous vitality when won — that 
he felt as if she spoke a language sweet- 
er and purer in many of its tones than 
the current speech of society, but a lan- 
guage with which neither his own people 
nor that society would ever be familiar. 


Amorous and easily impressed as he 
was, her beauty drew him with, its subtle 
charm, but his doubt and her pride in- 
terposed barriers which even he dared not 
disregard ; and at the end of two months 
he was no nearer than at the beginning 
that understanding which he would have 
established with any other pretty woman 
in less than a week. And he was no 
surer of himself and what he did really 
desire. Yet, accustomed as he was to 
loves as easily won as the gathering of 
a flower by the wayside, and to the 
knowledge that Adelaide Birkett, hia 
social match in all things, was ready to 
pick up the handkerchief when he should 
think fit to throw it, this very doubt both 
of himself and Learn made half the in- 
terest if all the perplexity of the situa- 
tion. He knew, as well as he knew that 
the Corinthian shaft should bear the 
Corinthian capital, if it was Learn whom 
he loved it was Adelaide whom he ought 
to marry. She would carry incense to 
the gods of British respectability as a 
squire’s lady should, doing nothing that 
should not be done and leaving as little 
undone that should be done. She would 
preside at the Hill dinners with grace 
and join the meet at the coverside with 
punctuality ; she would dress as became 
her position, but neither extravagantly 
nor questionably, and she would be more 
likely to stint than to squander ; she 
would live as a polite Christian should, 
in the odor of genteel righteousness, not 
a fibre laid cross to the conventional 
grain, not a note out of tune with the or- 
thodox chord. Yes, it w^as the rector’s 
daughter whom he ought to marry, but 
it was Pepita’s whom he loved. Yet how 
would things go with such a perplexing 
iconoclast at the head of affairs.^ Im- 
agine the feelings of an English squire, 
M. H. of his county, loving dogs and 
horses as some women love children, 
and regarding poaching and vulpicide 
as crimes almost as bad as murder — 
imagine his feelings when his beautiful 
wife, grave and simple, should say at a 
hunt-dinner, “I do not like riding. I 
think hunting stupid and cruel : an army 
of men in red coats after a poor little 
hare — it is horrid ! I think poaching 


THE ATONEMENT OF IeAM DUNDAS. 


147 


quite right. God gave beasts and birds to 
us all alike, and your preserves are rob- 
beries. I would like to save all the foxes, 
and I hate the dogs when they catch 
them for be sure she would never learn 
to call them hounds. What would he 
feel ? It would be an incongruous kind 
of thing altogether, Edgar used to think 
when meditating on life as seen through 
the curling clouds of his cigar. 

But he loved her — he loved her : daily 
with more passion, because daily hold- 
ing a stronger check on himself) and so 
accumulating by concentration. It was 
the old combat between love and reason, 
personal desires and social feelings, and 
as yet it was undecided which side would 
win. Now it was Adelaide and her ex- 
act suitability for her part, when he would 
avoid Learn Dundas for days ; now it 
was Learn and his fervid love for her, 
his passion of doubt, his fever of long- 
ing, when he would all but commit him- 
self and tempt the fortune of the future 
irrevocably. 

One day, during this time of sickness 
in the village and Edgar’s lonely resi- 
dence at the Hill, Learn was riding along 
the Green Lanes, a pretty bit of quiet 
country, when she heard the well-known 
hoofs thundering rapidly behind her, 
and in due time Major Harrowby drew 
rein at her side. “ I saw you from the 
Sherrington road,” he said, his eyes kind- 
ling with pleasure at the meeting. 

Learn smiled, that pretty little flutter- 
ing smile which was so peculiarly her 
own, playing like a flicker of tender sun- 
shine over her face, but she felt gladder 
than she showed. It was not her way 
to flourish her feelings like flags in the 
face of men. Her reticence was part of 
her dislike to noise and glare. ” I am 
glad to see you,” she returned quietly, 
her eyes raised for a moment to his. 

‘‘I sometimes fear I annoy you by 
joining you so often,” said Edgar. 

‘‘No, you do not annoy me,” Learn 
answered. 

‘‘It is a pleasure to know at least as 
much as that,” he returned with a forced 
laugh. 

‘‘ Yes ? But why should you think that 
you annoy me ?” she asked. 


” Oh, perhaps you see too much of me, 
and so get tired of me. The thing is 
possible,” he said, stroking his horse’s 
ears. 

Learn looked at him as she had looked 
before, but this time without the smile. 
‘‘Are you tired of me that you say so?” 
she asked. 

‘‘No, no, no ! How can you say such 
a thing — how dream it?” cried Edgar. 
‘‘How could I be tired of you ? Why, 
you are the sunshine of my life, the one 
thing I ” — he checked himself — ‘‘ I look 
forward to meeting,” he added awk- 
wardly. 

‘‘Then why should I be tired of you?” 
she returned. ‘‘You are kind to me; 
you tell me things I do not know ; and,” 
with maddening unconsciousness of how 
her words might be taken, ‘‘there is no 
one else.” 

This was the nearest approach to a 
compliment that Learn had ever made. 
She meant simply that, as there was no 
one else to tire her, how could her pleas- 
ant friend Major Harrowby possibly do 
so ? But Edgar naturally took her words 
awry. ‘‘And if there were any one else 
I suppose I should be nowhere? My 
part has not often been that of a pis 
alter!' with a deep flush of displeasure. 

‘‘Why do you say that?” she asked in 
a slight tone of surprise. ‘‘You would 
be always where you are.” 

‘‘With you ?” 

Her face asked his meaning. 

‘‘ I mean, would you always hold me 
as much your friend, always care for me 
as much as you do now — if, indeed, you 
care for me at all — if any one else was 
here?” he explained. 

Learn turned her troubled eyes to the 
ground. ‘‘I do not change like the 
wind,” she answered, wishing he would 
not talk of her at all. 

^‘No, I do not think you do or would,” 
returned Edgar, bending his head nearer 
to hers as he drew his horse closer. ‘‘ I 
should think that once loved would be 
always loved with you, Miss Dundas?” 
He said this in a low voice that slightly 
trembled. 

She was silent. She had a conscious- 
ness of unknown dangers, sweet and 


148 


THE ATONEAIENT OF LEAM FUND AS. 


perilous, closing around her — dangers 
which she must avoid she scarcely knew 
how, only vaguely conscious as she was 
that they were about. Then she said, 
with an effort, “I do not like myself 
talked of. It does not matter what I 
am.” 

‘‘To me everything !” cried Edgar im- 
pulsively. 

‘‘You say what you do not mean,” re- 
turned Learn. ‘‘I am not your sister: 
how, then,’ should it matter?” 

Her grave simplicity was more se- 
ductive to him than the most coquettish 
wiles would have been. She was so en- 
tirely at sea in the art of love-making 
that her very ignorance provoked a more 
explicit declaration. ‘‘ Are there only sis- 
ters in the world?” he asked passionate- 
ly, yet angry with himself for skirting so 
near to the edge of peril. 

‘‘No ; there are mothers,” said Learn. 

Edgar caught his breath, but again 
checked himself just in time to prevent 
the words ‘‘and wives,” that rose to his 
lips. ‘‘And friends,” he substituted, with 
evident constraint and as awkwardly as 
before. It was not often that a woman 
had been able to disconcert Edgar Har- 
rowby so strangely as did this ignorant 
and innocent half-breed Spanish girl. 

“And friends,” repeated Learn. “ But 
they are not much.” 

“Not Alick Corfield?” 

“Alick Corfield? He is my good 
friend,” she answered quietly. 

“Yes, I know how much you like 
him.” An understanding ear would have 
caught the sneering undertone in these 
words. 

“Yes, I like him,” responded Learn 
witji unmoved gravity. 

“And you are sorry that he is ill — very 
sorry, awfully sorry?” 

“ I am sorry.” 

“Would you be as pained if I were 
ill ? and would you come every day to 
the Hill to ask after me, as you go to 
Steel’s Corner to ask after him ?” 

“ I would be pained if you were ill, but 
I would not go to the Hill every day,” 
said Learn. 

“No? Why this unfair preference?” 
he asked. 


“ Because I am not afraid of Mrs. Cor- 
field,” she answered. 

“And you are of my mother?” 

“Yes. She is severe.” 

“ It is severe in you to say so,” said 
Edgar gently. 

“No,” said Learn with her proud air. 
“ It is true.” 

“Then you would not like to be my 
mother’s daughter?” asked Edgar, both 
inflamed and troubled. 

Learn looked him straight in the face, 
utterly unconscious of his secret mean- 
ing. “ No,” she answered, her head held 
high, her dark eyes proud and fixed, and 
her small mouth resolute, almost hard. 
“I would like to be no one’s daughter 
but mamma’s.” 

“I do love your fidelity,” cried Edgar 
with a burst of admiration. “You are 
the most loyal girl I know.” 

She turned pale : her head drooped. 
“Let us talk of something else,” she said 
in an altered voice. “ Myself is displeas- 
ing to me.” 

“ But if it pleases me ?” 

“That is impossible,” said Learn. “How 
can it please you 

Was it craft? was it indifference? or 
was it honest ignorance of the true mo- 
tive of a man’s words and looks ? Edgar 
pondered for a moment, but could come 
to no definite conclusion save rejection 
of that one hypothesis of craft. Learn 
was too savagely direct, too uncompro- 
mising, to be artful. No man who un- 
derstood women only half so well as 
Edgar Harrowby understood them could 
have credited such a character as hers 
with deception. 

He wavered, then, between the alter- 
native of indifference or ignorance. If 
the one, he felt bound by self-respect to 
overcome it — that self-respect which a 
man of his temperament puts into his 
successes with women ; if the other, he 
must enlighten it. “ Does it not please 
you to talk of those you like ?” he asked 
after a short pause. 

“Yes,” said Learn, her face suddenly 
softening into tenderness as she thought 
of her mother, of whom Edgar did not 
think. “Talk to me of Spain and all 
that you did there.” 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


149 


“And that would be of what you like ?’’ 
he asked. 

“Of what I love,” returned Learn in a 
low voice, her eyes lifted to his, soft and 
humid. 

“How can I read you ? What can I 
think? What do you want me to be- 
lieve ?” cried Edgar in strange trouble. 

“What have I said.^” she asked with 
grave surprise. “ Why do you speak like 
this ?” 

“Are you playing with me, or do you 
want me to understand that you have 
made me happy ?” he cried, his face, voice, 
bearing, all changed, all full of an un- 
known something that half allured and 
half frightened her. 

She turned aside her head with her 
cold, proud, shrinking air. “I am not 
playing with you ; and you are silly to 
say I have made you happy,” she said, 
shaking her reins lightly and quickening 
her chestnut’s uneasy pace ; and Edgar, 
quickening the pace of his heavy bay, 
thought it wiser to let the moment pass, 
and so stand free and still wavering — in 
doubt and committed to nothing. 

Thus the time wore on, with frequent 
meetings, always crowded with doubts 
and fears, hopes, joys, displeasures in a 
tangled heap together, till the drying 
winds of March set in and cleared off the 
last of the fever, which had by now worn 
itself away, and by degrees the things of 
North Aston went back to their normal 
condition. The families came into resi- 
dence again, and save for the widow’s wail 
and the orphan’s cry in the desolated vil- 
lage below, life passed as it had always 
passed, and the strong did not spend their 
strength in bearing the burdens of the 
weak. 

The greatest social event that had 
taken place in consequence of the epi- 
demic was, that Mr. Dundas had made 
acquaintance with his new tenant at Lion- 
net. Full of painful memories for him 
as the place was, he could not let the 
poor fellow die, he said, with no Chris- 
tian soul near him. As a landlord he 
felt that he owed this mark of humanity 
to one of whom, if nothing absolutely 
good was known, neither was there any- 
thing absolutely bad, save that negative 


misdemeanor of not coming to church. 
As this was not an unpardonable offence 
to a man who had traveled much if he 
had thought litde, Mr. Dundas let his 
humanity get the upper hand without 
much difficulty. By which it came about 
that he and his new tenant became friends, 
as the phrase goes, and that thus another 
paragraph was added to the restricted 
page of life as North Aston knew it. 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

ONLY A DREAM. 

Of all those who lived through the 
fever, poor Alick Corfield’s case had 
been the most desperate while it lasted. 
Mr. Gryce, his fellow-sufferer, had been 
up and about his usual work, extracting 
Aryan roots and impaling Lepidoptera 
for a month and more, while Alick was 
still in bed among ice-bags and Condy’s 
Fluid, and as bad as at the beginning — in- 
deed, worse, having had a relapse which 
nothing but his wiry constitution, backed 
by his mother’s scientific nursing, could 
have pulled him through. Gradually the 
danger passed, and this time his conva- 
lescence was solid, and, though slow, un- 
interrupted. He began to cr^p about 
the house by the aid of sticks and arms, 
and he came down stairs for the first 
time on the day when the Harrowbys 
and Birketts returned home ; but he re- 
mained in strict quarantine, and Steel’s 
Corner was scrupulously avoided by the 
neighbors as the local lazaretto which it 
would be sinful to invade. By all but 
Learn, who went daily to ask after the 
invalid, and to keep the mother com- 
pany for exactly half an hour by the 
clock. 

One day when she went on her usual 
errand Mrs. Corfield met her at the hall- 
door. “Alick will be glad to see you, 
my dear,” she called out, radiant with 
happiness, as the girl crossed the thresh- 
old. “We are in the drawing-room to- 
day, as brisk and bonny as a bird : such 
a treat for him, poor dear !” 

“ I am glad,” said Learn, who held a 
basket of early spring flowers in her hand. 
“Now you are happy.” 


I 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


150 

Tears came into the poor mother’s 
haggard eyes. “Happy, child! You 
do not know what I feel,’’ she said with 
tremulous emotion. “ Only a mother who 
has been so near to the loss of her dear- 
est, so near to heartbreak and despair, 
as I have been, can know the blessed 
joy of the reprieve.’’ 

“How you love him !’’ said Learn in 
a half whisper. “ I loved mamma like 
that.’’ 

“Yes, poor child! I remember,’’ said 
Mrs. Corfield with compassion. She for- 
got that at the time she had thought the 
girl’s love and despair, both the one and 
the other, exaggerated and morbid. She 
met her now on the platform of sympa- 
thy, and her mind saw what it brought 
to-day as it had seen what it had brought 
before, but she was not conscious of the 
contradiction. 

“I thought I should have died too 
when she did, wish I had,’’ said 
Learn, looking up to the sky with dreamy 
love, as if she still thought to meet her 
mother’s face in the blue depths. 

“My poor dear! it was terrible for 
you,’’ sighed the elder woman sympa- 
thetically. “But you must not always 
mourn, you know. There is a time for 
everything, even for forgetting, and for 
being happy after sorrow.’’ 

“Never a time for me to forget mam- 
ma, nor to be happy,’’ said Learn. 

“Why not?’’ answered Mrs. Corfield 
in her impatient way. “You are young, 
nice-looking, in tolerably good health, 
but you are black round your eyes to- 
day. You have friends : I am sure all of 
us, from my husband downward, think a 
great deal of you. And Alick has always 
been your friend. Why should you not 
be happy ?’’ 

Learn put the question by. “Yes, you 
have always been kind to me,’’ she an- 
swered. “ I remember when mamma 
died how you wanted to be kind then. 
But I did not understand you as I do 
now. And how good Alick was ! How 
sorry I should have been if anything 
had happened to him now !’’ Her beau- 
tiful face grew tender with the thought. 
She did really love Alick in her girlish, 
sisterly way. 


Mrs. Corfield looked at her. ‘Have 
you never loved any one else as you 
loved your poor mother?’’ she asked. 

Learn lifted her eyes. “Never,’’ she 
answered simply. “ I have liked a few 
people since, but love as I loved mam- 
ma? No!’’ 

“ Learn, I am going to ask you a straight- 
forward question, and you must give me a 
straightforward answer : Which do you 
like best, my boy or Edgar Harrowby ?’’ 
Mrs. Corfield asked this suddenly, as if 
she wanted to surprise the girl’s secret 
thought rather than have a deliberate 
answer. 

“ I like them differently,’’ began Learn 
without affectation. “Alick is so unlike 
Major Harrowby in every way. And 
then I have known him so long — since I 
was a mere child. I feel that I can say 
what I like to him : I always did. But 
Major Harrowby is a stranger, and I 
am — I don’t know : it is all different. 
I cannot say what I mean.’’ She hesi- 
tated, stopped, grew pale, glanced aside 
and looked disturbed ; then putting on 
her old air of cold pride, she drew her- 
self a few paces away and said, “Why 
do you ask me such a question, Mrs. Cor- 
field ? You should not.’’ 

Mrs. Corfield sighed. If Edgar was 
undecided between his personal desires 
and conventional fitness, she was unde- 
cided between her longing to see Alick 
happy and her dislike to his being happy 
in any way but the one she should de- 
sign for him. He had raved a good deal 
during his illness, and had said many 
mad things connected with Learn — al- 
ways Learn ; and since his convalescence 
his mother had seen clearly enough how 
his heart was toward her. His pleasure 
when he heard that she had been there, 
his childish delight in anything that she 
had brought for him, the feverishness 
with which he waited to hear her step, 
her voice from a distance, always de- 
manding that the doors should be left 
open so that he might hear her, — all be- 
trayed to his mother as plainly as con- 
fession would have done the real thoughts 
of his heart, and cast a trouble into her 
own whence she saw no present satis- 
factory issue. Though she was fond of 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


Learn now, and grateful to her for her 
faithful visits during Alick’s illness, yet, 
just as Edgar doubted of her fitness as 
a wife for the master of the Hill, so did 
she doubt of her fitness as a daughter- 
in-lav for Steel’s Corner. As a friend 
she was pleasant enough, with her quaint 
ways and pretty face ; but as one of the 
Corfield family, bound to them for ever 
— what then would she be ? But again, 
if Alick really loved her, she would not 
like to see him disappointed. So, what 
between her dislike to the marriage 
should it ever be, and her fear for Alick’s 
unhappiness should he ask and be re- 
fused, the poor mother was in a state 
of confused feelings and contradictory 
wishes which did not agree with a nature 
like hers, given to mathematical certain- 
ties and averse to loose ends and frayed 
edges anywhere. As nothing more was 
to be got out of Learn at this moment, 
and as Mrs. Cdrfield knew that Alick 
would be impatient, they went into the 
drawing-room together. Learn carrying 
her basket of spring flowers for her old 
friend. 

It was pitiful to see the poor fellow. 
Thin, gaunt, plainer than ever, if also 
ennobled by that almost saintly dignity 
which is given by illness, the first im- 
pression made on Learn was one of acute 
physical repulsion : the second only gave 
room to compassion. Fortunately, that 
little shudder of hers was unnoticed, and 
Alick saw only the beloved face, more 
beautiful to him than anything out of 
heaven, with its grave intensity of look 
that seemed so full of thought and feel- 
ing, turned to him — saw only those glori- 
ous eyes fixed once more straight on his — 
felt only the small hand which seemed to 
give him new life to touch lying clasped 
in his own, weak, wasted, whitened, like 
a dead hand for color against the warm 
olive of her skin. It was almost worth 
while to have been separated so long to 
have this joy of meeting ; and he thought 
his pain and danger not too dearly bought 
by this exquisite pleasure of knowing that 
she had pitied him and cared for him. 

He raised himself from his pillows as he 
took her small, warm, fibrous hand, and 
his pallid face brightened into a tearful 


151 

smile. “Ah!” he said, drawing a deep 
breath, “ I am so glad to see you again I” 

“ I am glad to see you too,” said Learn 
with a certain sudden embarrassment, 
she did not know why, but it came from 
something that she saw in his eyes and 
could not explain even to herself. ' 

“Are you?” He pressed her hand, 
which he still held. “ It does me good 
to hear you say so,” he replied. 

“ I have brought you some flowers,” 
then said Learn, a little coldly, drawing 
away her hand, which she hated to have 
either held or pressed. 

He took them with a pleased smile. 
“Our pretty wild-flowers !” he said grate- 
fully, burying his face in them, so cool 
and fresh and fragrant as they were. 
“They are like the giver,” he added 
after a pause, “only not so sweet.” 

“ Do you remember when I persisted 
to you thfere were no wild-flowers in Eng- 
land ?” asked Learn, wishing that Alick 
would not pay her compliments. 

“ Do I remember ? That was the first 
time I saw you,” cried Alick. “Of what 
else have I thought ever since?” 

“You like wild-flowers and celandine, 
do you not?” asked poor Learn, despe- 
rately disturbed. “ I found them in the 
wood as I came here.” 

“ And picked them for me ? — up in the 
corner there by Barton’s ? I know. And 
you went up the lane for them — for me ?” 
he repeated. 

“Yes,” said Learn. 

“ For me .^” he asked again. 

“ Why, yes : for whom else could it 
have been ?” answered Learn in the tone 
of grave rebuke he knew so well — the 
tone which always expressed, “You are 
stupid.” 

Alick’s lip quivered. “You are so 
good,” he said. 

“Am I ?” asked Learn seriously. 

Then something passed over her face, 
a kind of gray shadow of remembrance, 
and she dropped her eyes. Was she 
good ? and could he think so ? 

A silence fell between them, and each 
knew of what the other was thinking : 
then Learn said suddenly, to break that 
terrible silence, which she felt was more 
betraying than even speech would have 


152 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM BUND AS. 


been, “ I am sorry you have been so ill. 
How dreadfully ill you have been !” 

“Yes,” he said, “I have been bad 
enough, I believe, but by God’s grace I 
have been spared.” 

“ It would have been more grace not 
to have let you get ill in the beginning,” 
said Learn gravely. 

Alick looked distressed. Should he 
never Christianize this pagan ? “ Don’t 
say that, dear,” he remonstrated. “We 
must not call in question His will.” 

“Things are things,” said Learn with 
her quiet positiveness. “If they are bad, 
they are bad, whoever sends them.” 

“ No. God cannot send us evil,” cried 
Alick. 

“Then He does not send us disease or 
sorrow,” answered Learn. “ If He does, 
it is silly to say they are good, or that He 
is kind to make us ill and wretched. I 
cannot tell stories. And all you people 
do.” 

“Learn, you pain me so much when 
you talk like this. It is bad, dear — im- 
pious and unchristian. Ah ! can I never 
bring you to the true way ?” he cried with 
real pain. 

“You cannot make me tell stories or 
talk nonsense because you say it is re- 
ligious,” replied Learn, impervious and 
unconvinced. “I like better to tell the 
truth and call things by their right 
names.” 

“And you cannot feel that we are lit- 
tle children walking in the dark and that 
we must accept by faith ?” said Alick. 

She shook her head, then answered 
with a certain tone of triumph in her 
voice, “Well, yes, it is the dark: so let 
it be the dark, and do not pretend you 
understand when you do not. Do not 
say God made you ill in one breath, and 
in another that He is kind. It is silly.” 

“Now, my boy, don’t excite yourself,” 
said Mrs. Corfield, bustling into the room 
and noting how' the thin cheek had flush- 
ed and how bright and feverish the hol- 
low eyes of her invalid were looking. 
“You know the doctor says you are not 
to be excited or tired. It is the worst 
thing in the world for you.” 

“ I am neither, mother : don’t alarm 
yourself,” he answered; “but I must 


have a little talk with Learn. I have 
not seen her for so long. How long is 
it, mother?” 

“Well, my dear, you have been ill for 
over ten weeks,” she said as she went to 
the window with a sudden gasp. 

“Ten weeks gone out of my life !” he 
replied. 

“We have all been sorry,” said Learn 
a little vaguely. 

His eyes grew moist. He was weak 
and easily moved. “Were you very 
sorry?” he asked. 

“Very,” she answered, for her quite 
warmly. 

“Then you did not want me to die?” 
He said this with a yearning look, rais- 
ing himself again on his elbow to meet 
her eyes more straightly. 

“Want you to die?” she repeated in 
astonishment. “Why should I want you 
to die ? I want you to get well and live.” 

He took her hand again. “God bless 
you !” he said, and turned his face to the 
pillow to conceal that he was weeping. 

Again that gray look of remembrance 
passed over her face. She knew now 
what he. had meant. “No,” she said 
slowly, “I do not want you to die. You 
are good, and would harm no one.” 

After this visit Learn saw Alick when- 
ever she called at the house, which, how- 
ever, was not so often as heretofore, and 
week by week became still more seldom. 
Something was growing up in her heart 
against him that made his presence a 
discomfort. It was not fear nor moral 
dislike, but it was a personal distaste 
that threatened to become unconquer- 
able. She hated to be with him ; hated 
to see his face looking at her with such 
yearning tenderness as abashed her 
somehow and made her lower her eyes ; 
hated his endeavors to convert her to 
an orthodox acceptance of mysteries she 
could not understand and of explana- 
tions she could not believe ; hated his 
sadness, hated his joy : she only wished 
that he would go away and leave her 
alone. What did he mean ? What did 
he want? He was changing from the 
blushing, awkward, subservient dog of 
his early youth, and from the still sub- 
servient if also more argumentative pas- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


153 


tor of these later days alike, and she did 
not like the new Alick who was gradual- 
ly creeping into the place of the old. 

When Mrs. Corfield spoke of taking 
him to the sea for change of air, her 
heart bounded as if a weight had been 
suddenly removed, and she said, “Yes, 
he ought to go,” so warmly that the 
mother was surprised, wondering if she 
cared so much for him that the idea of 
his getting good elated her beyond her- 
self and made her forget her usual re- 
serve. She instinctively contrived not 
to see him alone now when she went to 
Steel’s Corner during his tedious conva- 
lescence, for the poor fellow mended but 
slowly, if surely. Either she had only 
a short time to stay, and so stood for a 
moment, making serious talk impossible, 
or she took little Fina with her, or may- 
be she entangled Mrs. Corfield in the 
conversation so that she should not leave 
them alone, the vague fear and distaste 
possessing her making her strangely rti- 
see and on the alert. But one day she 
was caught. It had to come, and it was 
only a question of time. She knew that, 
as we know when our doom is upon us. 

Learn had not intended to go in to- 
day, but Alick, who was in the garden 
rejoicing in the warmth and freshness 
of this tender April noontide, came to 
meet her at the second gate, and asked 
her to come and sit with him on the gar- 
den-seat, there where the budding lilacs 
began to show their bloom, and there 
where they sat on that fatal day when 
she had hidden the little phial in her 
hair and bade him tell her of flowers till 
she tired. 

She hesitated, and was on the point 
of refusing, when he took her by the 
upper part of her arm as if to hold her. 
“ Do,” he pleaded. “ I want to say some- 
thing to you.” 

“ I have no time to stay,” she answer- 
ed, shrinking from his touch. 

“Yes, yes, time enough for all I have 
to say,” he returned. “I beg you to 
come with me to-day. Learn — I beg it ; 
and I do not often ask a favor of you.” 

There was something in his manner 
that seemed to compel Learn to consent 
in spite of herself. True, he besought. 


but al-so he seemed almost to command ; 
and if he did not command, then his 
earnestness was so strong that she was 
forced to yield to it. Trembling, but 
with her proud little head held straight 
— wondering what was coming, and 
vaguely conscious that whatever it was 
it would be pain — Learn let him take her 
to the garden-seat where the budding 
lilacs spoke of springtime freshness and 
summer beauty. Alick was trembling 
too, but from excitement, not from fear. 
He had made up his mind now, and 
when he had once resolved he was not 
wavering. He would ask her to share 
his life, accept his love, and he would 
thus take on himself half the burden of 
her sin. This was how he felt it. If he 
married her, knowing all that he knew, 
he would make himself the partner of 
her crime, because he would accept her 
past like her present — like her future; 
and thus he would be equally guilty with 
her before God. But he would trust to 
prayer and the Supreme Mercy to save 
her and him. He would carry no merits 
of devotion as his own claim, but he 
would have freed her of half her guilt, 
and he would be content to bear his own 
portion of punishment for this unfath- 
omable gain. It was the man’s love, 
but also the soul’s passionate promise of 
sacrifice and redemption, that gave him 
boldness to plead, power to ask for a 
grace to which, had this, deep stain of 
sin never tainted her, he would not have 
dared to aspire. But, as it was, his love 
was her greater safety, and what he gain- 
ed in earthly joy he would lose in spirit- 
ual peace, while her partial forgiveness 
would be bought by the loss of his se- 
curity of salvation. Not that she under- 
stood all this or ever should, but it gave 
him courage. 

“ When you first saw me. Learn, after 
my illness you said that you wanted me 
to live,” he began in a low voice, husky 
with emotion. “ Do you mean this ?” 

“Yes,” she said, looking straight be- 
fore her. 

“ Live for you ?” he asked. 

“For us all,” she answered. 

“No, not for us all — for you,” he re- 
turned with insistance. 


154 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM EUNDAS. 


“ That would be silly,” said Learn quiet- 
ly. ‘‘I am not the only person in the 
world: you have your mother.” 

‘‘For my mother, perhaps ; but for the 
world, nothing. You are the world to 
me,” said Alick. ‘‘Give me your love, 
and I care for nothing else. Tell me 
you will be my wife, and I can live then 
— live as nothing else can make me. 
Learn, can you love me, dear? I have 
loved you from the first moment I saw 
you. Will you be my wife ?” 

‘‘Your wife!” cried Learn with an in- 
voluntary gesture of repulsion. ‘‘You 
are dreaming.” 

‘‘No, no: I am in full earnest. Tell 
me that you love me. Learn. Oh, I be- 
lieve that you (Jo* Surely I have not 
deceived myself so far. Why should 
you have come every day — every day, as 
you have done — if you do not love me ? 
Yes, you do — I know you do. Say so. 
Learn, my darling, my beloved, and put 
me out of my misery of suspense.” 

‘‘You are my good friend : I love you 
like a friend ; but a wife — that is differ- 
ent,” faltered Learn. 

‘‘Yes, but it will come if you try,” 
pleaded Alick, shifting his point from 
confidence to entreaty. ‘‘Won’t you try 
to love me as I love you. Learn ? Won’t 
you try to love me as a wife loves her 
husband ?” 

She turned away. ‘‘ I cannot,” she 
answered in a low voice, yet firm and 
distinct. It was a voice in which even 
the most sanguine must have recognized 
the accent of hopeless certainty, inevit- 
able despair. 

‘‘ Learn, it will be your salvation,” cried 
Alick, taking her hands. He meant hj^r 
spiritual salvation, not her personal safe- 
ty : it was a prayer, not a threat. 

‘‘You would not force me by anything 
you may know ?” asked Learn in the 
same low, firm, distinct voice. ‘‘Not 
even for safety, Alick.” 

‘‘Which I would buy with my own,” 
he answered — ‘‘with my eternal salva- 
tion.” 

‘‘ I am not worthy of such love,” said 
Learn trembling. ‘‘And oh, dear Alick, 
do not blame me, but I cannot return 
it,” she added piteously. 


She saw him start and heard him moan 
when she said this, but for a moment he 
was silent. He seemed half stunned as 
if by a heavy blow, but one that he was 
doing his best to bear. ‘‘Tell me so 
again, Learn. Let me be convinced,’* 
he then said with pathetic calmness, 
looking into her face. ‘‘You cannot love 
me ? — never ? never ?” 

‘‘ Never,” she said, her voice breaking. 

Alick covered his face in his hands, 
and she saw the tears trickle slowly 
through his fingers. He made no com- 
plaint, no protestation, only covered up 
his face and prayed, weeping, recogniz- 
ing his fate. 

She was sorry and heart-struck. She 
felt cruel, selfish, ungrateful, but for all 
that she could not yield nor say that she 
would marry him, trying to love him. 
Confused images of something dearer 
than this as the love of her life passed 
before her mind. They were images 
without recognizable form or tangible 
substance, but they were the true love, 
and this was not like them. No, she 
could not yield. Sorry as she might be 
for him, and was, she could not promise 
to marry him. 

“Yes,” he then said after a pause, lift- 
ing up his wan face, tear-stained and dis- 
ordered, but making a sad attempt to 
smile — ‘‘yes, dear Learn, I was, as you 
say, dreaming. We shall always be 
friends, though — brother and sister, as 
we have been — to the end of our lives, 
shall we not ?” 

‘‘Yes,” was her answer, tears in her 
own eyes and a kind of wonder at her 
hardness running through her repug- 
nance. 

‘‘ Thank you, darling, thank you ! If 
you want a friend, and I can be that 
friend and can serve you, you will come 
to me, will you not ? You may want me 
some day, and you know that I shall not 
fail you. Don’t you know that, my roy- 
al Learn ?” 

‘‘I am sure of you,” she half whisper- 
ed, shuddering. To be* in his power and 
to have rejected him ! It all seemed 
very terrible and confused to Learn, to 
whom things complex and entangled 
were abhorrent. 



Page 154, 












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THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNE AS. 


155 


“And now forget all this. I was only 
dreaming, dear. Why, no, of course 
you could not have married me — never 
could — never, never ! I know that well 
enough now. You see I have been ill,” 
nervously plucking at his hands, “and 
have had strange fancies, and I do not 
know myself or anything about me quite 
yet. But forget it all. It was only a sick 
fancy, and I thought what did not exist.” 

“ I am sorry to have hurt you even in 
fancy,” said Learn, giving a sigh of re- 
lief. “ I do not like to see you unhappy, 
Alick, You are so good to me.” 


“And to the end of my life I shall be 
what li have been,” he said earnestly. 
“You can trust me. Learn.” 

“ I am sorry I have hurt you,” she said 
again, bending forward and looking up 
into his face. “ But it was only a dream, 
was it not?” pleadingly. 

He smiled pitifully. “Yes, dear, only 
a dream,” he answered, turning* away his 
head. After a while he took her hand 
and looked into her face. “And now 
it has passed,” he said, calm that she 
should not be sorry 


\ 

* 


“VZZI- 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

THE FRIEND OF THE FUTURE. 

I NSTEAD of going home when she 
left Steel’s Corner, Learn turned up 
into the wood, making for the old hiding- 
place where she and Alick had so often 
sat in the first days of her desolation and 
when he had been her sole comforter. 
She was very sorrowful, and oppressed 
with doubts and self-reproaches. As she 
climbed the steep wood-path, her eyes 
fixed on the ground, her empty basket 
in her hand, and her heart as void of 
hope or joy as was this of flowers, she 
thought over the last hour as she might 
have thought over a death. How sorry 
she was that Alick had said those words ! 
how grieved that he loved her like this, 
when she did not love him, when she 
could never have loved him if even she 
had not been a Spaniard and her moth- 
er’s daughter! 

But she did not wish that he was dif- 
ferent from what he was, so that she 
might have been able to return his love. 
Learn had none of that shifting uncer- 
tainty, that want of a central determina- 
tion, which makes so many women trans- 
act their lives by an If. She knew what 
she did not feel, and she did not care to 
regret the impossible, to tamper with the 
indefinite. She knew that she neither 
loved Alick nor wished to love him. 
Whether she had unwittingly deceived 
him in the first place, and in the second 
ought to sacrifice herself for him, unlov- 
ing, was each a question on which she 
pondered full of those doubts and self- 
reproaches that so grievously beset her. 

As she was wandering drearily on- 
ward Mr. Gryce saw her from a side 
path. He struck off to meet her, smil- 
ing, for he had taken a strong affection 
for this strange and beautiful young crea- 
ture, which he justified to himself as in- 
terest in her history. 

This acute, suspicious and inquisitive 
old heathen had some queer notions 


packed away in his wallet of biological 
speculations — notions which supplement- 
ed the fruits of his natural gifts, and 
which he always managed to harmonize 
with what he already knew by more 
commonplace means. He had been 
long in the East, whence he had brought 
a cargo of half-scientific, half-supersti- 
tious fancies — belief in astrology, mes- 
merism, spiritualism, and cheiromancy 
the most prominent. He could cast a 
horoscope, summon departed spirits, heal 
^he sick and read the reticent by mes- 
meric force, and explain the past as well 
as prophesy the future by the lines in the 
hand. 

So at least he said ; and people were 
bound to believe that he believed in 
himself when he said so. He had once 
looked at Team’s hand, and had seen 
something there which, translated by his 
rules, had helped him on the road that 
he had already opened for himself by 
private inquiry based on the likelihood 
of things. Crime, love, sorrow — it was 
no ordinary history that was printed in 
the lines of her feverish little palm, as it 
was no ordinary character that looked 
out from her intense pathetic face. There 
was something almost as interesting here 
as a meditation on the mystic Nirvana 
or a discourse on that persistent residuum 
of all myths — Maya, delusion. 

It was to follow up the line thus open- 
ed to him that he had attached himself 
with so much zeal to his landlord, un- 
sympathetic as such a man as Sebastian 
Dundas must needs be to a metaphysi- 
cal and superstitious student of human- 
ity, a born detective, shrewd, inquisitive 
and suspicious. But he attached him- 
self for the sake of Learn and her future, 
saying often to himself, “By and by. 
She will come to me by and by, when I 
can be useful to her.” 

Meanwhile, Learn received his cares 
with the characteristic indifference of 
youth for the attentions of age. She 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


was not at the back of the motives which 
prompted him, and thought him tire- 
some with his mild way of getting to 
know so many things that were no con- 
cern of his. The shrewd guesses which 
he was making, and the terrible mosaic 
that he was piecing together out of such 
stray fragments as he could pick up — 
and he was always picking them up — 
were hidden from her ; and she under- 
stood nothing of the mingled surmise 
and certainty which made his interest in , 
her partly retrospective and partly pro- 
phetic, as he fitted in bit by bit that 
hidden thing in the past or foresaw the 
discovery that must come in the future. 
She only thought him tiresome and in- 
quisitive, and wished that he would not 
come so often to see papa. 

It did not take a large amount of that 
faculty of thought-reading which Mr. 
Gryce claimed as so peculiarly his own 
to see that something unusual had hap- 
pened to disturb poor Learn to-day. As 
she came on, so wrapped in the sorrow 
of her thoughts that the world around 
her was as a world that is dead — taking 
no heed of the flowers, the birds, the 
sweet spring scents, the glory of the 
deep-blue sky, while the flickering shad- 
ows of the budding branches played over 
her like the shadow of the net in which 
she had entangled herself — she looked 
the very embodiment of despair. Her 
face, never joyous, was now infinitely 
tragic. Her dark eyes were bright with 
the tears that lay behind them ; her 
proud mouth had drooped at the cor- 
ners ; she was walking as one who neither 
knows where she is nor sees what is be- 
fore her, as one for whom there is no sun 
by day and no stars for the night — lost 
to all sense but the one faculty of suffer- 
ing. She did not even see that some one 
stood straight in the path before her, till 
“Whither and whence?” asked Mr. 
Gryce, barring her way. 

Then she started and looked up. Evi- 
dently she had not heard him. He re- 
peated the question with a difference. 
“Ah! good-morning to you. Miss Dun- 
das. Where are you going ? where have 
you been ?” he saic^in his soft, low-pitch- 
ed, lisping voice, with the provincial ac- 


157 

cent struggling through its patent affec- 
tation. 

“I am going to the yew tree and I 
have been to Steel’s Corner,” she an- 
swered slowly, in her odd, almost mathe- 
matically exact manner of reply. 

“From Steel’s Corner! And how is 
that excellent young man, our deputy 
shepherd?” he asked. 

“ Better,” she said with even more than 
her usual curtness, and she was never 
prolix. 

“He has been fearfully ill, poor fel- 
low !” said Mr. Gryce, in the manner of 
an ejaculation. 

She looked at the flowers with which 
the wood was golden and azure. “ Yes,” 
was her not too eloquent assent. 

“And you have been sorry ?” 

“ Every one has been sorry,” said Learn 
evasively. 

“Yes, you have been sorry,” he re- 
peated : “ I have read it in your face.” 

He had done nothing of the kind : he 
had guessed it from the fact of her daily 
visits, and he had surmised a special in- 
terest from that other group of facts which 
had first set him thinking — namely, that 
Steel’s Corner owned a laboratory — two, 
for the matter of that ; that old Dr. Cor- 
field was a clever toxicologist ; that Learn 
had stayed there during her father’s hon- 
eymoon ; and that her stepmother had 
died on the night of her arrival. “And 
your average Englishman calls himself 
a creature with brains and inductive 
powers !” was his unspoken commentary 
on the finding of the coroner’s jury and 
the verdict of the coroner. “Bull is a 
fool,” the old heathen used to think, 
hugging his own superior sagacity as 
a gift beyond those which Nature had 
allowed to Bull in the abstract. 

“I have known him since I was a 
child. Of course, I have been sorry,” 
said Learn coldly. 

She disliked being questioned as much 
as being touched. The two, indeed, were 
correlative. 

“ Early friendships are very dear,” said 
Mr. Gryce, watching her. He was open- 
ing the vein of another idea which he 
had long wanted to work. 

She was silent. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUETDAS. 


158 

“Don’t you think so?” he asked. 

“They may be,” was her reluctant 
answer. 

“No, they are — believe me, they are. 
The happiest fate that man or woman 
can have is to marry the early friend- 
transform the playmate of childhood into 
the lover of maturity, the companion of 
age.” 

Learn made no reply. She was afraid 
of this soft-voiced, large -eyed, benev- 
olent old man who seemed able to read 
the hidden things of life at will. It dis- 
turbed her that he should speak at this 
moment of the happiness lying in the 
fulfillment of youthful friendship by the 
way of mature love; and, proud and 
self-restrained as her bearing was, Mr. 
Gryce saw through the calmer surface 
into the disturbance beneath. 

“Don’t you think so?’’ he asked for 
the second time. 

“ How should I know ?’’ Learn answer- 
ed, raising her eyes, but not looking into 
her companion’s face — looking an inch 
or two above his head. “ I have seen 
too little to say which is best.’’ 

“ True, my child, I had forgotten that,’’ 
he said kindly. “ Will you take my word 
for it, then, in lieu of your own expe- 
rience ?’’ 

“That depends,’’ said Learn. “What 
is good for one is not good for all.’’ 

“But safety is always good,’’ returned 
Mr. Gryce, meaning to fall back on the 
safety of love and happiness if he had 
made a bad shot by his aim at safety 
from the detection of crime. 

A scared look passed over Leam’s face. 
It was a look that meant a cry. She 
pressed her hands together and involun- 
tarily drew back a step, cowering. She 
felt as if some strong hand had struck 
her a heavy blow, and that it had made 
her reel. “You are cruel to say that. 
Why should I marry — ?’’ She began in 
a defiant tone, and then she stopped. 
Was she not betraying herself for the 
very fear of discovery ? 

“Alick Corfield, for instance?’’ put in 
Mr. Gryce at a venture. “He may serve 
for an illustration as well as any one 
else,’’ he added with a soothing kind of 
indifference, troubled by the intense ter- 


ror that came for one moment into her 
face. How soon he had startled her 
from her poor little hiding-place ! How 
easy the assumption of extraordinary 
powers based on the clever use of ordi- 
nary faculties ! Your true magician is, 
after all, only your quiet and accurate 
observer. “You are not vexed that I 
speak of him when I want a name ?’’ he 
asked, after a pause to give Learn time 
to regain her self-possession, to readjust 
the screen, to fasten once more the mask. 

“Why should I be vexed?’’ she said 
in a low voice. 

“ He is not disagreeable to you ?’’ 

“No, he is my friend,’’ she answered. 

“And a good fellow,’’ said Mr. Gryce, 
lisping over a maple twig. “ Don’t you 
think so ?’’ 

“ He is good,’’ responded Learn like a 
dry and lifeless echo. 

“ An admirable son.*’ 

“Yes.’’ 

“A devoted friend — a friend to be 
trusted to the death ; a man without his 
price, incorruptible, with whom a secret, 
say, would be as safe as if buried in the 
grave. He would not give it even to the 
wind, and no reed on his land would 
whisper ‘ Midas has ass’s ears.’ ’’ 

“He is good,’’ she repeated with a 
shiver. Yet the sun was shining and 
the spring-tide air was sweet and warm. 

“And he would make the most faith- 
ful and indulgent husband.’’ 

There was no answer. 

“ Do you not agree with me ?’’ 

“ How should I know ?’’ she answered ; 
and she said no more, though she still 
shivered. 

“ Be sure of it — take my word for it,” 
he said again, earnestly. 

“ It is nothing to me. And I hate your 
word indulgent r cried Learn with a 
flash of her mother’s fierceness. 

Mr. Gryce, still watching her, smiled 
softly to himself. His love of know- 
ledge, as he euphemistically termed his 
curiosity, was roused to the utmost, and 
he was like a hunter who has struck an 
obscure trail. He wished to follow this 
thing to the end, and to know in what 
relations she and her old friend stood 
together — if Alick knew what he, Mr. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


159 


Gryce, knew now, and had offered to 
marry her notwithstanding ; and wheth- 
er, if he had offered. Learn had refused 
or accepted. Observation and induction 
were hurrying him very near the point. 
Her changing color, her averted eyes, 
her effort to maintain the pride and cold- 
ness which were as a rule maintained 
without effort, the spasm of terror that 
had crossed her face when he had spo- 
ken of Alick’s fidelity, all confirmed him 
in his belief that he was on the right 
track, and that the lines in her hand co- 
incided with the facts of her tragic life. 
Tragic indeed — one of those lives fated 
from the beginning, doomed to sorrow 
and to crime like the Orestes, the (Edi- 
pus, of old. 

But if he was curious, he was compas- 
sionate ; if he tortured her now, it was 
that he might care for her hereafter. 
That hereafter would come — he knew 
that — and then he would make himself 
her salvation. 

He thought all this as he still watched 
her. Learn standing there like a creature 
fascinated, longing to break the spell and 
escape, and unable. 

“ Tell me,” then said Mr. Gryce in a 
soft and crooning kind of voice, com- 
ing nearer to her, ” what do you think of 
gratitude ?” 

” Gratitude is good,” said Learn slow- 
ly, in the manner of one whose answer 
is a completed thesis. 

‘‘ But how far?” 

” I do not know what you mean,” she 
answered with a weary sigh. 

Again he smiled : it was a soft, sleepy, 
soothing kind of smile, that was almost 
an opiate. 

‘‘You are not good at metaphysics?” 
he said, coming still nearer and passing 
his short thick hands over her head ca- 
ressingly. 

‘‘ I am not good at anything,” she an- 
swered dreamily. 

‘‘Yes, at many things — to answer me 
for one — but bad at dialectics.” 

‘‘Ido not understand your hard words,” 
said Learn, her sense of injury at being 
addressed in an unknown tongue rousing 
her from the torpor creeping over her. 

How much she wished that he would 


release her ! She had no power to leave 
him of her own free-will. A certain com- 
pelling something in Mr. Gryce always 
forced her to do just as he wished — to 
answer his questions, stay when he stop- 
ped, follow when he beckoned. She re- 
sented in feeling, but she obeyed in fact ; 
and he valued her obedience more than 
he regretted her resentment. 

‘‘How far would you go to prove your 
gratitude.?” he continued. 

‘‘ I do not know,” said Learn, the weary 
sigh repeated. 

‘‘ Would you marry for gratitude where 
you did not love ?” 

‘‘No,” she answered in a low voice. 

‘‘Would you marry for fear, then, if 
not for gratitude or love ? If you were 
in the power of a man, would you marry 
that man to save yourself from all chance 
of betrayal ? I have known women who 
would. Are you one of them ?” 

Again he passed his hands over her 
head and across and down her face. 
His voice sounded sweet and soft as 
honey : it was like a cradle-song to a 
tired child. Leam’s eyes drooped heav- 
ily. A mist seemed stealing up before 
her through which everything was trans- 
formed — by which the sunshine became 
as a golden web wherein she was entan- 
gled, and the shadows as lines of the net 
that held her — where the songs of the 
birds melted into distant harmonies echo* 
ing the sleepy sweetness of that soft com- 
pelling voice, and where the earth was 
no longer solid, but a billowy cloud 
whereon she floated rather than stood. 
A strange sense of isolation possessed 
her. It was as if she were alone in the 
universe, with some all-powerful spirit 
who was questioning her of the secret 
things of life, and whose questions she 
must answer. Mr. Gryce was not the 
tenant of Lionnet, as the world knew 
him, but a mild yet awful god, in whose 
presence she stood revealed, and who 
was reading her soul, like her past, 
through and through. She was before 
him there as a criminal before a judge — 
discovered, powerless — and all attempt at 
concealment was at an end. 

‘‘Tell me what you know,” said the 
soft and honeyed voice, ever sweeter, 


t6o 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


ever more soothing, more deadening to 
her senses. 

Leam’s whole form drooped, yielded, 
submitted. In another moment she 
would have made full confession, when 
suddenly the harsh cry of a frightened 
bird near at hand broke up the sleepy 
harmonies and scattered the compelling 
charm. Learn started, flung back her 
head, opened her eyes wide and fixed 
them full on her inquisitor. Then she 
stiffened herself as if for a personal re- 
sistance, passed her hands over her face 
as if she were brushing it from cobwebs, 
and said in a natural voice, offended, 
haughty, cold, “ I did not hear what you 
said. I was nearly asleep.” 

‘‘Wake, then,” said Mr. Gryce, mak- 
ing a movement as if he too were brush- 
ing away cobwebs from her face. After 
a pause he took both her hands in his. 
“Child,” he said, speaking naturally, 
without a lisp and with a broader pro- 
vincial accent than usual — speaking, too, 
with ill-concealed emotion — “some day 
you will need a friend. When that day 
dawns come to me. Promise me this. 
I know your life and what lies in the 
past. Do not start — no, nor cover your 
face, my child. I am safe, and so are 
you. You must feel this, that I may be 
of use to you when you want me; for 
you will want me some day, and I shall 
be the only one who can save you.” 

“What do you know?” asked Learn, 
making one supreme effort over herself 
and confronting him. 

“ Everything,” said Mr. Gryce sol- 
emnly. 

“Then I am lost,” she answered in a 
low voice. 

“You are saved,” he said with tender- 
ness. “ Do not be afraid of me : rather 
thank God that He has given you into 
my care. You have two friends now in- 
stead of one, and the latest the most 
powerful. Good-bye, my poor misguided 
and bewildered child. A greater than 
you or I once said, ‘ Her sins, which are 
many, are forgiven her, because she 
loved much.’ Cannot you take that to 
yourself? If not now, nor yet when re- 
morse is your chief thought, you will 
later. Till then, trust and hope.” 


He turned to leave her, tears in his 
eyes. 

“ Stay !” cried Learn, but he only shook 
his head and waved his hand. 

“Not now,” he said, smiling as he 
broke through the wood, leaving her 
with the impression that a chasm had 
suddenly opened at her feet, into which 
sooner or later she must fall. 

She stood a few moments where the 
old philosopher and born detective had 
left her, then went up the path to the 
hiding-place where she had so often be- 
fore found the healing to be had from 
Nature and solitude — to the old dark- 
spreading yew, which somehow seemed 
to be more her friend than any human 
being could be or was — more than even 
Alick in his devotedness or Mr. Gryce in 
his protection. And there, sitting on the 
lowest branch, and sitting so still that 
the birds came close to her and were not 
afraid, she dreamed herself back to the 
desolate days of her innocent youth — 
those days which were before she had 
committed a crime or gained friend or 
lover. 

She had been miserable enough then 
— one alone in the world and one against 
the world. But how gladly she would 
have exchanged her present state for the 
worst of her days then ! How she wish- 
ed that she had died with mamma, or, 
living, had not taken it as her duty to 
avenge those wrongs which the saints al- 
lowed ! Oh, what a tangled dream it all 
was ! she so hideously guilty in fact, and 
yet that thought of hers, if unreal and 
insane, that had not been a sin. 

But she must wake to the reality of 
the present, not sit here dreaming over 
the past and its mystery of loving crime. 
She must go on as if life were a mere 
holiday-time of peace with her, where 
no avenging Furies followed her, lurking 
in the shadows, no sorrows threatened 
her, looking out with scared, scarred 
faces from the distance. She must carry 
her burden to the end, remembering 
that it was one of her own making, and 
for self-respect must be borne with that 
courage of despair which lets no one see 
what is suffered. Of what good to dream, 
to lament ? She must live with dignity 


THE ATOEEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


i6i 


while she chose to live. When her grief 
had grown too great for her strength, 
then she could take counsel with her- 
self whether the fire of life was worth 
the trouble of keeping alight, or might 
not rather be put out without more ado. 


CHAPTER XXX. 

MAYA— DELUSION. 

Leam was not dedicated to peace to- 
day. As she turned out of the road she 
came upon the rectory pony-carriage — 
Adelaide driving Josephine and little Fi- 
na — just as it had halted in the highway 
for Josephine to speak to her brother. 

Adelaide was looking very pretty. H er 
delicate pink cheeks were rather more 
flushed and her blue eyes darker and 
fuller of expression than usual. Change 
of air had done her good, and Edgar’s 
evident admiration was even a better 
stimulant. She and her mother had 
ended their absence from North Aston 
by a visit to the lord lieutenant of the 
county, and she was not sorry to be 
able to speak familiarly of certain great 
personages met there as her co-guests — 
the prime minister for one and an arch- 
bishop for another. And as Edgar was, 
she knew, influenced by the philosophy 
of fitness more than most men, she 
thought the prime minister and the arc*h- 
bishop good cards to play at this moment. 

Edgar was listening to her, pleased, 
smiling, thinking how pretty she looked, 
and taking her social well-being and roll- 
call of grand friendships as gems that 
enriched him too — flowers in his path as 
well as roses in her hand, and as a sunny 
sky overarching both alike. She really 
was a very charming girl — ^just the wife 
for an English country gentleman — just 
the mistress for a place like the Hill, the 
heart of the man owning the Hill not 
counting. 

But when Leam turned from the wood- 
path into the road, Edgar felt like a man 
who has allowed himself to be made en- 
thusiastic over but an inferior bit of art, 
knowing better. Her beautiful face, with 
its glorious eyes so full of latent passion, 
dreaming thought, capacity for sorrow — 


all that most excites yet most softens the 
heart of a man ; her exquisite figure, so 
fine in its lines, so graceful yet not weak, 
so tender yet not sensual; as she stood 
there in the sunlight the gleam of dusky 
gold showing on the edges of her dark 
hair ; her very attitude and action as she 
held a basket full of wild-flowers which 
with unconscious hypocrisy she had pick- 
ed to give herself the color of an excuse 
for her long hiding in the yew tree, — all 
dwarfed, eclipsed Adelaide into a mere 
milk-and-roses beauty of a type to be 
seen by hundreds in a day ; while Leam 
— who was like this peerless Leam ? 
Neither Spain nor England could show 
such a one as she. Ah, where was the 
philosophy of fitness now, when this ex- 
quisite creation, more splendid than fit, 
came to the front ? 

Edgar went forward to meet her, that 
look of love surprised out of conceal- 
ment which told so much on his face. 
Adelaide saw it, and Josephine saw it, 
and the eyes of the latter grew moist, 
but the lips of the other only closed more 
tightly. She accepted the challenge, and 
she meant to conquer in the fight. 

Wearied by her emotions, saddened 
both by the love that had been confessed 
and the friendship that had been offered, 
this meeting with Edgar Harrowby seem- 
ed to Leam like home and rest to one 
very tired and long lost. The bright 
spring day, which until now had been as 
gray as winter, suddenly broke upon her 
with a sense of warmth and beauty, and 
her sad face reflected in its tender, evan- 
escent smile the delight of which she had 
become thus suddenly conscious. She 
laid her hand in his frankly : he had 
never seen her so frankly glad to meet 
him ; and a look, a gesture, from Leam — 
grave, proud, reticent Leam — meant as 
much as cries of joy and caresses from 
others. 

“Good-morning, Miss Dundas : where 
have you been ?’’ said Edgar, his accent 
of familiar affection, which meant “Be- 
loved Leam,’’ in nowise overlaid by the 
formality of the spoken “Miss Dundas.’’ 

“ Into the wood,’’ said Leam, her hand, 
as if for proof thereof, stirring the flowers. 

“ It is a new phase to see you given to 


i 62 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


rural delights and wild-flowers, Learn,” 
said Adelaide with a little laugh. 

‘‘ But how pleasant that our dear Learn 
should have found such a nice amuse- 
ment !” said Josephine. 

‘‘As picking primroses and bluebells, 
Joseph ?” And Adelaide laughed again. 

Somehow, her laugh, which was not 
unmusical, was never pleasant. It did 
not seem to come from the heart, and 
was the farthest in the world removed 
from mirth. 

Learn looked at her coldly. ‘‘I like 
flowers,” she said, carrying her head 
high. 

‘‘So do I,” said Edgar with the inten- 
tion of taking her part. ‘‘ What are 
these things ?” holding up a few cuckoo- 
flowers that were half hidden like deli- 
cate shadows among the primroses. 

‘‘You certainly show your liking by 
your knowledge. I thought every school- 
boy knew the cuckoo-flower !” cried Ade- 
laide, trying to seem natural and not bit- 
ter in her banter, and not succeeding. 

‘‘ I can learn. Never too late to niend, 
you know. And Miss Dundas shall teach 
me,” said Edgar. 

‘‘I do not know enough : I cannot 
teach you,” Learn answered, taking him 
literally. 

‘‘ My dear Learn, how frightfully literal 
you are !” said Adelaide. ‘‘ Do you think 
it looks pretty ? Do you really believe 
that Major Harrowby was in earnest 
about your giving him botanical les- 
sons ?” 

‘‘ I believe people I respect,” returned 
Learn gravely. 

‘‘Thanks,” said Edgar warmly, his 
face flushing. 

Adelaide’s face flushed too. ‘‘ Are you 
going through life taking as gospel all 
the unmeaning badinage which gentle- 
men permit themselves to talk to ladies ?” 
she asked from the heights of her supe- 
rior wisdom. ‘‘ Remember, Learn, at your 
age girls cannot be too discreet.” 

‘‘ I do not understand you,” said Learn, 
fixing her eyes on the fair face that strove 
so hard to conceal the self within from 
the world without, and to make imper- 
sonal and aphoristic what was in reality 
passionate disturbance. 


‘‘A girl who has been four years at a 
London boarding-school not to under- 
stand such a self-evident little speech as 
that!” cried Adelaide, with well-acted 
surprise. ‘‘How can you be insincere ? 
I must say I have no faith, myself, in 
Bayswater ingenues : have you, Edgar ?” 
with the most graceful little movement 
of her head, her favorite action, and one 
that generally made its mark. 

‘‘ I do not understand you,” said Learn 
again. ‘‘ I only know that you are rude : 
you always are.” 

She spoke in her most imperturbable 
manner and with her quietest face. Noth- 
ing roused in her so much the old Learn 
of pride and disdain as these encounters 
with Adelaide Birkett. The two were 
like the hereditary foes of old-time ro- 
mance, consecrated to hate from their 
birth upward. 

‘‘ Come, come, fair lady, you are rather 
hard on our young friend,” said Edgar 
with a strange expression in his eyes — 
angry, intense, and yet uncertain. He 
wanted to protect Learn, yet he did not 
want to offend Adelaide ; and though he 
was angry with this last, he did not wish 
her to see that he was. 

‘‘ Dear Learn ! I am sure she is very 
sweet and nice,” breathed Josephine; 
but little Fina, playing with Josephine’s 
chatelaine, said in her childish treble, 
‘‘ No, no, she is not nice : she is cross, 
and never laughs, and she has big eyes. 
They frighten me at night, and then I 
scream. Your are far nicer. Missy Jo- 
seph.” 

Adelaide laughed outright ; Josephine 
was embarrassed between the weak 
good- nature that could not resist even 
a child’s caressing words and her con- 
stitutional pain at giving pain ; Edgar 
tried to smile at the little one’s pertness 
as a thing below the value of serious 
notice, while feeling all that a man does 
feel when the woman whom he loves is 
in trouble and he cannot defend her; 
but Learn herself said to the child, grave- 
ly and without bitterness, ‘‘ I am not cross, 
Fina, and laughing is not everything.” 

‘‘Right, Miss Dundas!” said Edgar 
warmly. ‘‘ If the little puss were older 
she would understand you better. You 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


unconscionable little sinner ! what do you 
mean? hey?” good-humoredly taking 
Fina by the shoulders. 

*‘Oh, pray don’t try and make the child 
a hypocrite,” said Adelaide. “You, of 
all people in the world, Edgar, objecting 
to her naive truth! — you, who so hate 
and despise deception !” 

While she had spoken Fina had crawl- 
ed over Josephine’s lap to the side where 
Edgar was standing. She put up her 
fresh little face to be kissed. “I don’t 
like Learn, and I do like you,” she said, 
stroking his beard. 

And Edgar, being a man, was there- 
fore open to female flattery, whether it 
was the frank flattery of an infant Venus 
hugging a waxen Cupid or the more sub- 
tle overtures of a withered Ninon taking 
God for her latest lover — with interludes. 

“But you should like Learn too,” he 
said, fondling her. ‘‘ I want you to love 
me, but you should love her as well.” 

‘‘ Oh, any one can get the love of chil- 
dren who is kind to them,” said Adelaide. 
“You know you are a very kind man, 
Edgar,” in a quiet, matter-of-fact way. 
“All animals and children love you. It 
is a gift you have, but it is only because 
you are kind.” 

The context stood without any need 
of an interpreter to make it evident. 

“ But I am sure that Learn is kind to 
Fina,” blundered Josephine. 

“And the child dislikes her so much ?” 
was Adelaide’s reply, made in the form 
of an interrogation and with arched eye- 
brows. 

“Fina is like the discontented little 
squirrel who was never happy,” said Jo- 
sephine, patting the plump little hand 
that still meandered through the depths 
of Edgar’s beard. 

“ I am happy with you. Missy Joseph,” 
pouted Fina; “and you,” to Edgar, whom 
she again lifted up her face to kiss, kisses 
and sweeties being her twin circumstances 
of Paradise. 

“And with sister Learn: say ‘With 
Learn,’ else I will not kiss you,” said 
Edgar, holding her off. 

She struggled, half laughing, half 
minded to cry. “ I want to kiss you,” 
she cried. 


163 

“ Say ‘ With Learn,’ and then I will,” 
said Edgar. 

The child’s face flushed a deeper crim- 
son, her struggles became more earnest, 
more vicious, and her laugh lost itself in 
the puckered preface of tears. 

“ Don’t make her cry because she will 
not tell a falsehood,” remonstrated Ade- 
laide quietly. 

“She does not like me. Saying that 
she does would not be true, and would 
not make her,” added Learn just as qui- 
etly and with a kind of hopeless accept- 
ance of undeserved obloquy. 

On which Edgar, not wishing to pro- 
long a scene that began to be undigni- 
fied, released the child, who scrambled 
back to Josephine’s lap and hid her 
flushed and disordered little face on 
the comfortable bosom made by Nature 
for the special service of discomposed 
childhood. 

“She is right to like you best,” said 
Learn, associating Edgar as the brother 
with Josephine’s generous substitution 
of maternity. 

“I don’t think so. You are the one 
she should love — who deserves her 
love,” he answered emphatically. 

“ Come, Joseph,” cried Adelaide. “ If 
these two are going to bandy compli- 
ments, you and I are not wanted.” 

“Don’t go, Adelaide: I have worlds 
yet to say to you,” said Edgar. 

“ Thanks I another time. I do not like 
to see things of which I disapprove,” was 
her answer, touching her ponies gently 
and moving away slowly. 

When she had drawn off out of earshot 
she beckoned Edgar with her whip. It was 
impolitic, but she was too deeply moved 
to make accurate calculations. “Dear 
Edgar, do not be offended with me,” she 
said in her noblest, most sisterly man- 
ner. “ Of course I do not wish to inter- 
fere, and it is no business of mine, but is 
it right to fool that unhappy girl as you 
are doing ? I put it to you, as one wo- 
man anxious for the happiness and repu- 
tation of another — as an old friend who 
values you too much to see you make the 
mistake you are making now without a 
word of warning. It can be no business 
of mine, outside the purest regard and 


164 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


consideration for you as well as for her. 
I do not like her, but I do not want to see 
her in a false position and with a dam- 
aged character through you.” 

Had they been alone, Edgar would 
probably have accepted this remon- 
strance amicably enough. He might 
even have gone a long way in proving 
it needless. But in the presence of Jo- 
sephine his pride took the alarm, and 
the weapon intended for Learn cut Ade- 
laide’s fingers instead. 

He listened patiently till she ended, 
then he drew himself up. “Thanks!” 
he drawled affectedly. “You are very 
kind both to Miss Dundas and myself. 
All the world knows that the most vig- 
ilant overseer a pretty girl can have is a 
pretty woman. When the reputation of 
Miss Dundas is endangered by me, it 
will then be time for her father to inter- 
fere. Meanwhile, thanks ! I like her 
quite well enough to take care of her.” 

“ Now, Adelaide, you have vexed him,” 
said Josephine in dismay as Edgar strode 
back to where Leam*remained waiting for 
him. 

“ I have done my duty,” said Adelaide, 
drawing her lips into a thin line and 
lowering her eyebrows ; and her friend 
knew her moods and respected them. 

On this point of warning Edgar against 
an entanglement with Learn she did real- 
ly think that she had done her duty. She 
knew that she wished to marry him her- 
self — in fact, meant to marry him — and 
that she would probably have been his 
wife before now had it not been for this 
girl and her untimely witcheries ; but 
though, naturally enough, she was not 
disposed to love Learn any the more 
because she had come between her and 
her intended husband, she thought that 
she would have borne the disappoint- 
ment with becoming magnanimity if she 
had been of the right kind for Edgar’s 
wife. With Adelaide, as with so many 
among us, conventional harmony was a 
religion in itself, and he who despised 
its ritual was a blasphemer. And sure- 
ly that harmony was not be found in 
the marriage of an English gentleman 
of good degree with the daughter of a 
dreadful low-class Spanish woman — a 


girl who at fifteen years of age had 
prayed to the saints, used her knife as a 
whanger, and maintained that the sun 
went round the earth because mamma 
said so, and mamma knew 1 No, if Ed- 
gar married any one but herself, let him 
at least marry some one as well fitted 
for him as herself, not one like Learn 
Dundas. 

For the sake of the neighborhood at 
large the mistress of the H ill ought to be 
a certain kind of person — they all knew 
of what kind — and a queer, unconform- 
able creature like Learn set up there as 
the Mrs. Harrowby of the period would 
throw all things into confusion. What- 
ever happened, that must be prevented 
if possible, for Edgar’s own sake and for 
the sake of the society of the place. 

All of which thoughts strengthened 
Adelaide in her conviction that she had 
done what she ought to have done in 
warning Edgar against Learn, and that 
she was bound to be faithful in her 
course so long as he was persistent in 
his. 

Meanwhile, Edgar returned to Learn, 
who had remained standing in the mid- 
dle of the road waiting for him. Noth- 
ing belonged less to Learn than forward- 
ness or flattery to men ; and it was just 
one of those odd coincidences which 
sometimes happen that as Edgar had 
not wished her good-bye, she felt herself 
bound to wait his return. But it had the 
look of either a nearer intimacy than ex- 
isted between them, or of Beam’s laying 
herself out to win the master of the Hill 
as she would not have laid herself out to 
win the king of Spain. In either case 
it added fuel to the fire, and confirmed 
Adelaide more and more in the course 
she had taken. “Look there !” she said 
to Josephine, pointing with her whip 
across the field, the winding way hav- 
ing brought them in a straight line with 
the pair left on the road. 

“Very bold, I must say,” said Joseph- 
ine; “but Learn is such a child! — she 
does not understand things as we do,” 
she added by way of apology and defence. 

“Think not?” was Adelaide’s reply; 
and then she whipped her ponies and 
said no more. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM BUND AS. 


\ 

j “Why does Miss Birkett hate me?” 

! asked Learn when Edgar came back. 

I “ Because — Shall I tell you ?” he 
1 1 answered with a look which she could 
) not read. 

“Yes, tell me.” 

“Because you are more beautiful than 
she is, and she is jealous of you. She is 
very good in her own way, but she does 
not like rivals near her throne ; and you 
are her rival without knowing it.” 

Learn had looked straight at Edgar 
when he began to speak, but now she 
dropped her eyes. For the first time in 
her life she did not disclaim his praise, 
nor feel it a thing that she ought to re- 
sent. On the contrary, it made her heart 
beat with a sudden throb that almost 
frightened her with its violence, and that 
seemed to break down her old self in its 
proud reticence and cold control, leaving 
her soft, subdued, timid, humble — child- 
like, and yet not a child. Her face was 
pale ; her eyelids seemed weighted over 
her eye's, so that she could not raise 
them ; her breath came with so much 
difficulty that she was forced to unclose 
her lips for air ; she trembled as if with 
a sudden chill, and yet her veins seemed 
running with fire ; and she felt as if the 
earth moved under her feet. What mal- 
ady was this that had overtaken her so 
suddenly ? What did it all mean ? It 
was something like that strange sensa- 
tion which she had had a few hours back 
in the wood, when Mr. Gryce had seem- 
ed to her like some compelling spirit 
questioning her of her life, while she was 
his victim, forced to reveal all. And yet 
it was the same, with a difference. That 
had been torture covered down by an 
anodyne : this was in its essence ecstasy, 
if on the outside pain. 

“ Look at me. Learn,” half whispered 
Edgar, bending over her. 

She raised her eyes with shame and 
difficulty — very slowly, for their lids were 
so strangely heavy ; very shyly, for there 
was something in them, she herself did 
not know what, which she did not wish 
him to see. Nevertheless, she raised 
them because he bade her. How sweet 
and strange it was to obey him against 
her own desire ! Did he know that she 


165 

looked at him because he told her to do 
so ? and that she would have rather kept 
her eyes to the ground ? Yes, she raised 
them and met his. 

Veiled, humid, yearning, those eyes of 
hers told all — all that she herself did not 
know, all that Edgar had now hoped, 
now feared, as passion or prudence had 
swayed him, as love or fitness had seem- 
ed the best circumstance of life. 

“ Learn !” he said in an altered voice : 
she scarcely recognized it as his. He 
took her hand in his, when suddenly 
there came two voices on the air, and 
Mr. Gryce and Sebastian Dundas, dis- 
puting hotly oh the limits of the Un- 
knowable, turned the corner and came 
upon them. 

Then the moment and its meaning 
passed, the enchanted vision faded, and 
all that remained of that brief foretaste 
of Paradise before the serpent had en- 
tered or the forbidden fruit been tasted 
was the bald, prosaic fact of Major Har- 
rowby bidding Miss Dundas good-day, 
too much pressed for time to stop and 
talk on the Unknowable. 

“ Disappointed, baulked, ill-used !” were 
Edgar’s first angry thoughts as he strode 
along the road : his second, those that 
were deepest and truest to his real self, 
came with a heavy sigh. “Saved just 
in time from making a fool of myself,” 
he said below his breath, his eyes turned 
in the direction of the Hill. “It must 
be a warning for the future. I must be 
more on my guard, unless indeed I make 
up my mind to tempt fortune and take 
the plunge — for happiness such as few 
men have, or for the ruin of every- 
thing.” 

Meanwhile, pending this determina- 
tion, Edgar kept himself out of Team’s 
way, and days passed before they met 
again. And when they did next meet it 
was in the churchyard, in the presence 
of the assembled congregation, with Al- 
ick Corfield as the centre of congratula- 
tion on his first resumption of duty, Snd 
Learn and Edgar separated by the crowd 
and stiffened by conventionality into cold- 
ness. 

Maya — delusion! That strange trou- 
ble, sweet and thrilling, which disturbed 


i66 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM FUND AS, 


Leam’s whole being ; Edgar’s unfathom- 
able eyes, which seemed almost to burn 
as she looked at them ; his altered voice, 
scarcely recognizable it was so changed 
— ati a mere phantasy born of a dream 
— all, what is so much in this life of ours, 
a mockery, a mistake, a vague hope with- 
out roots, a shadowy heaven that had no 
place in fact, the cold residuum of en- 
thralling and bewitching myths — all 
Maya, delusion ! 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

BY THE BROAD. 

After that scene in the pony-carriage 
Learn began to take it to heart that little 
Fina did not love her. Hitherto, solicit- 
ous only to do her duty unrelated to sen- 
timent, she had not cared to win the 
child’s rootless and unmeaning affec- 
tion : now she longed to hear her say 
to Major Harrowby, “I love Learn.” 
She did not care about her saying it to 
any one else, but she thought it would 
be pleasant to see Edgar smile on her as 
he had smiled at Josephine when Fina 
had crawled on to her lap that day of 
Maya, and said, ‘‘You are far nicer. Mis- 
sy Joseph.” 

She would like to have Edgar’s good 
opinion. Indeed, that was only proper 
gratitude to a friend, not unwomanly 
submission to the great young man of 
the place. He was invariably kind to 
her, and he had done much to make her 
cheerless life less dreary. He had lent 
her books to read, and had shown her 
pretty places in the district which she 
would never have seen but for him : he 
talked to her as if he liked talking to 
her, and he had defended her when Ade- 
laide was rude. It was right, then, that 
she should wish to please him and show 
him that she deserved his respect. 

Hence she put out her strength to win 
Fina’s love that she might hear her say, 
when next Major Harrowby asked her, 
‘‘Yes, I love Learn.” 

But who ever gained by conscious en- 
deavor the love that was not given by 
the free sympathies of Nature ? Hearts 
have been broken and lives ruined be- 


fore now for the want of a spell strong 
enough to turn the natural course of feel- 
ing ; and Leam’s success with Fina was 
no exception to the common experience. 
The more she sought to please her the 
less she succeeded; and, save that the 
child grew disobedient in proportion to 
the new indulgences granted, no cnange 
was effected. 

How should there be a change ? Learn 
could not romp, was not fond of kissing, 
knew no childish games, could not enter 
into childish nonsense, was entirely inca- 
pable of making believe, never seemed 
to be thinking of what she was about, 
and had big serious eyes that oppressed 
the little one with a sense of awe not 
conducive to love, and of which she 
dreamed with terrifying adjuncts when 
she had had too much cake too late at 
night. What there was of sterling in 
Learn had no charm for, because no 
point of contact with, Fina. Thus, all 
her efforts went astray, and the child 
loved her no better for being coaxed by 
methods that did not amuse her. At 
the end of all she still said with her 
pretty pout that Learn was cross — she 
would not talk to her about mamma. 

One day Learn took Fina for a walk 
to the Broad. It was the most unselfish 
thing she could do, for her solitary ram- 
bles, her unaccompanied rides, were her 
greatest pleasures ; save, indeed, when 
the solitude of these last was interrupted 
by Major Harrowby. This, however, had 
not been nearly so often since the return 
of the families as before ; for Adelaide’s 
pony-carriage was wellnigh ubiquitous, 
and Edgar did not care that the rector’s 
sarcastic daughter should see him escort- 
ing Learn in lonely places three or four 
times a week. Thus, the girl had fallen 
back into her old habits of solitude, and 
to take the child with her was a sacrifice 
of which she herself only knew the ex- 
tent. 

But, if blindly and with uncertain feet, 
stumbling often and straying wide. Learn 
did desire to find the narrow way and 
walk in it — to know the better thing and 
do it. At the present moment she knew 
nothing better than to give nurse a holi- 
day and burden herself with an uncon- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


167 


genial little girl as her charge and com- 
panion when she would rather have been 
alone. So this was how it came about 
that on this special day the two set out 
for the Broad, where Fina had a fancy 
to go. 

The walk was pleasant enough. Learn 
was not called on to rack her brains — 
those non-inventive brains of hers, which 
could not imagine things that never hap- 
pened — for stories wherewith to while 
away the time, as Fina ran alone, hap- 
py in picking the spring flowers growing 
thick on the banks and hedgerows. Thus 
the one was amused and the other was 
left to herself undisturbed ; which was 
an arrangement that kept Leam’s good 
intentions intact, but prevented the pen- 
ance which they included from becom- 
ing too burdensome. Indeed, her pen- 
ance was so light that she thought it not 
so great a hardship, after all, to make 
little Fina her companion in her rambles 
if she would but run on alone and con- 
tent herself with picking flowers that 
neither scratched nor stung, and where 
therefore neither the surgery of needles 
nor the dressing of dock-leaves was re- 
quired, nor yet the supplementary sooth- 
ing of kisses and caresses for her tearful, 
sobbing, angry pain. 

The Broad, always one of the pret- 
tiest points in the landscape, was to-day 
in one of its most interesting phases. 
The sloping banks were golden with 
globe-flowers and marsh “mary-buds,” 
and round the margin was a broad belt 
of silver where the starry white ranun- 
culus grew. All sorts of the beautiful 
aquatic plants of spring were flowering 
— some near the edges, apparently just 
within reach, tempting and perilous, and 
some farther off and manifestly hope- 
less : the leaves of the water-lilies, which 
later would be set like bosses of silver 
and gold on the shimmering blue, had 
risen to the surface in broad, green, shin- 
ing platters, and the low-lying branches 
of the trees at the edge dipped in the 
water and swayed with the running 
stream. 

It was the loveliest bit of death and 
danger to be found for miles round — so 
lovely that it might well have tempted 


the sorrowful to take their rest for ever 
in a grave so sweet, so eloquent of eter- 
nal peace. Even Learn, with all the un- 
spoken yearnings, the formless hopes, 
of youth stirring in her heart, thought 
how pleasant it would be to go to sleep 
among the flowers and wake up only 
when she had found mamma in heaven ; 
while Fina, dazzled by the rank luxu- 
riance before her, ran forward to the 
water’s edge with a shrill cry of delight. 

Learn called to her to stand back, to 
come away from the water and the bank, 
which, shelving abruptly, was a danger- 
ous place for a child. The footing was 
insecure and the soil treacherous — by 
no means a proper playground for the 
rash, uncertain feet of six. Twice or 
thrice Learn called, but Fina would not 
hear, and began gathering the flowers 
with the bold haste of a child disobeying 
orders and resolved to make the most 
of her opportunity before the time came 
of her inevitable capture. 

Thus Learn, walking fast, came up to 
her and took her by the arm in high dis- 
pleasure. “ Fina, did you not hear me ? 
You must not stand here,” she said. 

‘‘Don’t, Learn, you hurt me — you are 
cross : leave me alone,” screamed Fina, 
twisting her little body to free herself 
from her step-sister’s hand. 

‘‘ Be quiet. You will fall into the river 
and be drowned if you go on like this,’ 
said Learn, tightening her hold ; and those 
small nervous hands of hers had an iron 
grasp when she chose to put out her 
strength. 

‘‘Leave me alone. You hurt me — oh, 
you hurt me so much !” screamed Fina, 
still struggling. 

‘‘ Come with me, then. Do as you are 
bid and come away,” returned Learn, 
slightly relaxing her grasp. Though she 
was angry with the child, she did not 
want to hurt her. 

‘‘ I sha’n’t. Leave me alone. You are 
a cross, ugly thing, and I hate you,” was 
Fina’s sobbing reply. 

With a sudden wrench she tore her- 
self from the girl’s hands, slipped, stag- 
gered, shrieked, and the next moment 
was in the water, floating downward with 
the current and struggling vainly to get 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


1 68 

out ; while Learn, scarcely understand- 
ing what she saw, stood paralyzed and 
motionless on the bank. 

Fortunately, at this instant Josephine 
drove up. She was alone, driving her 
gray ponies in the basket phaeton, and 
saw the child struggling in the stream, 
with Learn standing silent, helpless, 
struck to stone as it seemed, watching 
her without making an effort to save her. 
“Learn! Final save her! save her!” cried 
Josephine, who herself had enough to do 
to hold her ponies, in their turn startled 
by her own sudden cries. “ Learn, save 
her!” she repeated; and then breaking 
down into helpless dismay she began to 
sob and scream with short, sharp hys- 
terical shrieks as her contribution to the 
misery of the moment. Poor Josephine ! 
it was all that she could do, frightened 
as she was at her own prancing ponies, 
distracted at the sight of Fina’s danger, 
horrified at Leam’s apparent apathy. 

As things turned out, it was the best 
that she could have done, for her voice 
roused Leam’s faculties into active life 
again, and broke the spell of torpor into 
which horror had thrown them. “Holy 
St. Jago, help me !” she said, instinctive- 
ly turning back to first traditions and 
making the sign of the cross, which she 
did not often make now, and only when 
surprised out of conscious into automatic 
action. 

Running down and along the bank, 
with one hand she seized the branch of 
an oak that swept into the water, then 
plunged in up to her shoulders to catch 
the child drifting down among the white 
ranunculus. Fortunately, Fina was still 
near enough to the shore to be caught 
as she drifted by without absolute danger 
of drowning to Learn, who waded back 
to land, drawing the child with her, not 
much the worse for her dangerous mo- 
ment save for the fright which she had 
suffered and the cold of her dripping 
clothes ; in both of which conditions Learn 
was her companion. 

So soon as she was safe on shore the 
child began to scream and cry piteously, 
as was perhaps but natural, and when 
she saw Josephine she tore herself away 
from Learn and ran up to her as if for 


protection. “Take me home to nurse,” 
she sobbed, climbing into the little low 
phaeton and clinging to Josephine, who 
was also weeping and trembling hyster- 
ically. “ Learn pushed me in : take me 
away from her.” 

“You say what is not true, Fina,” said 
Learn gravely, trembling as much as Jo- 
sephine, though her eyes were dry and 
she did not sob. “ You fell in because 
you would not let me hold you.” 

“You pushed me in, and I hate you,” 
reiterated Fina, cowering close to the 
bosom of her warm, soft friend. 

“Do you believe this?” asked Learn, 
turning to Josephine and speaking with 
all her old pride of voice and bearing. 
Nevertheless, she was as white as those 
flowers on the water. It was madame’s 
child who accused her of attempting to 
kill her, and it was the child whom she 
had so earnestly desired to win who now 
said, “ I hate her,” to the sister of the 
man to whom she longed to hear her say, 
“I love Learn.” 

“ Believe that you pushed her in — that 
you wanted to drown dear little Fina ? 
No !” cried Josephine in broken sen- 
tences through her tears. “She mistakes. 
— You must not say such dreadful things, 
my darling,” to Fina. “ Dear sister Learn 
would not hurt a hair of your head, I am 
sure.” 

“ She did : she pushed me in on pur- 
pose,” persisted the shivering child, be- 
ginning to cry afresh. 

On which, a little common sense dawn- 
ing on Josephine’s distracted mind, she 
did her best to stop her own hysterical 
sympathy, remembering that to go home, 
change their wet clothes, have something 
warm to drink and be put to bed would 
be more to the purpose for both at this 
moment than to stand there crying, shiv- 
ering and recriminating, with herself as 
the weak and loving judge, inclining to 
both equally, to settle the vexed question 
of accident or malice. 

“Good gracious! why are we waiting 
here?” she cried, drying her eyes quick- 
ly and ceasing to sob. “You will both 
get your deaths from cold if you stand 
here in your wet clothes. — Come in, dear 
Learn, and 1 will drive you home at once. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


169 


— Fina, my darling, leave off crying, that’s 
my little angel. I will take you to papa, 
and you will be all right directly. I can- 
not bear to see you cry so much, dear 
Fina: don’t, my pet.” 

Which only made the little one weep 
and sob the more, children, like women, 
liking nothing better than to be commise- 
rated because of distress which they could 
control without difficulty if they would. 

Seating the child at the bottom of the 
carriage and covering her with the rug, 
Josephine flicked her ponies, which were 
glad enough to be off and doing some- 
thing to which they were accustomed, 
and soon brought her dripping charge to 
Ford House, where they found Mr. Dun- 
das in the porch drawing on his gloves, 
his horse standing at the door. 

‘‘Good heavens ! what is all this about?” 
he cried, rushing forward to receive the 
disconsolate cargo, unloading one by one 
the whole group dank and dismal — ^Jo- 
sephine’s scared face swollen with tears, 
white and red in the wrong places; 
Leam’s set like a mask, blanched, rigid, 
tragic; Fina’s now flushed and angry, 
now pale and frightened, with a child’s 
swift - varying emotions ; and the gar- 
ments of the last two clinging like cere- 
ments and dripping small pools on the 
gravel. 

‘‘ Learn pushed me into the river,” said 
Fina, beginning to cry afresh, and hold- 
ing on by Josephine, who now kissed and 
coaxed her, and said, ‘‘ Fina, my darling, 
don’t say such a wicked thing of poor 
Learn : it is so naughty, so very naughty,” 
and then took to hugging her again, as 
the mood of the instant swayed her to- 
ward the child or the girl, but always 
full of womanly weakness and kindness 
to each, and only troubled that she had 
to make distinctions, as it were, between 
them. 

‘‘What is it you say, Fina?” asked 
Mr. Dundas slowly — ‘‘Learn pushed you 
into the river ?” 

‘‘Yes,” sobbed Fina. 

‘‘ I did not, papa. And I went in my- 
self to save her,” said Learn, holding her 
head very straight and high. 

Mr. Dundas looked at her keenly, 
sternly. ‘‘Well, no, Learn,” he answer- 


ed, with, as it seemed to her, marked 
coldness and in a strange voice : ‘‘with' 
all your unpleasant temper I do not like 
to suppose you could be guilty of the 
crime of murder.” 

The girl shuddered visibly. Her proud 
little head drooped, her fixed and fearless 
eyes sank shamed to the ground. ‘‘ I have 
always taken care of Fina,” she said in 
a humbled voice, as if it was a plea for 
pardon that she was putting forward. 

‘‘You pushed me in, and you did it 
on purpose,” repeated Fina; and Mr. 
Dundas was shocked at himself to find 
that he speculated for a moment on the 
amount of truth there might be in the 
child’s statement. 

Cold, trembling, distressed, Learn turn- 
ed away. Would that sin of hers always 
thus meet her face to face ? Should she 
never be free from its shadow ? Go where 
she would, it followed her, ineffaceable, 
irreparable — the shame of it never suffer- 
ed to die out, its remorse never quench- 
ed, the sword always above her head, to 
fall she knew not when, but to fall some 
day : yes, that she did know. 

‘‘ But you must go up stairs now,” said 
Josephine with a creditable effort after 
practicality : ‘‘ we shall have you both 
seriously ill unless you get your clothes 
changed at once.” 

Mr. Dundas looked at her kindly. 
‘‘ How wise and good you are !” he said 
with almost enthusiasm ; and Joseph- 
ine, her eyes humid with glad tears, her 
cheeks flushed with palpitating joy, sank 
in soul to him again, as so often before, 
and offered the petition of her humble 
love, which wanted only his royal signa- 
ture to make an eternal bond. 

‘‘ I love little Fina,” she said tremu- 
lously. It was as if she had said, ‘‘ I 
love you.” 

Then she turned into the house and 
indulged her maternal instinct by watch- 
ing nurse as she undressed .the child, put 
her in a warm bath, gave her some hot 
elderberry wine and water, laid her in 
her little bed, and with many kisses bade 
her go to sleep and forget all about ev- 
erything till tea-time. And the keen 
relish with which she followed all these 
nursery details marked her fitness for 


T70 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


the post of pro-mother so distinctly that 
it made nurse look at her more than 
once, and think — also made her say, as 
a feeler — “ Law, miss ! what a pity you’ve 
not had one of your own !” 

Her tenderness of voice and action 
with the child when soothing her at the 
door had also made Sebastian think, and 
the child’s fondness for this soft-faced, 
weak and kindly woman was setting a 
mark on the man’s mind, well into mid- 
dle age as she was. He began to ask 
himself whether the blighted tree could 
ever put forth leaves again ? whether there 
was balm in Gilead yet for him, and 
nepenthe for the past in the happiness 
of the future. He thought there might 
be, and that he had sat long enough now 
by the open grave of his dead love. It 
was time to close it, and leave what it held 
to the keeping of a dormant memory 
only — a memory that would never die, 
but that was serene, passive and at rest. 

So he pondered as he rode, and told 
Josephine’s virtues as golden beads be- 
tween his fingers, to which his accept- 
ance would give their due value, wanting 
until now — their due value, merited if not 
won. And for himself, would she make 
him happy ? On the whole he thought 
that she would. She worshiped him, 
perhaps, as he had worshiped that other, 
and it was pleasant to Sebastian Dundas 
to be worshiped. He might do worse, 
if also he might do better ; but at least 
in taking Josephine he knew what he 
was about, and Fina would not be made 
unhappy. He forgot Learn. Yes, he 
would take Josephine for his wife by and 
by, when the fitting moment came, and 
in doing so he would begin life anew and 
be once more made free of joy. 

He was one of those men resilient if 
shallow, and resilient perhaps because 
shallow, who, persecuted by an evil for- 
tune, are practically unconquerable — 
men who, after they have been prostrated 
by a blow severe enough to shatter the 
strongest heart, come back to their old 
mental place after a time smiling, in no- 
wise crushed or mutilated, and as ready 
to hope and love and believe and plan 
as before — men who are never ennobled 
by sorrow, never made more serious in 


their thoughts, more earnest in their aims, 
though, as Sebastian had been, they may 
be fretful enough while the sore is open 
— men who seem to be the unresisting 
sport of the unseen powers, buffeted, 
tortured as we see helpless things on 
earth — dogs beaten and horses lashed — 
for the mere pleasure of the stronger in 
inflicting pain, and for no ultimate good 
to be attained by the chastening. The 
souls of such men are like those weight- 
ed tumblers of pith : knocked down twen- 
ty times, on the twenty-first they stand 
upright, and nothing short of absolute 
destruction robs them of their elasticity. 
As now when Sebastian planned the base- 
lines of his new home with Josephine, 
and built thereon a pretty little temple 
of friendship armed like love. 

His heart was broken, he said to him- 
self, but Josephine held the fragments, 
and he would make himself tolerably 
content with the rivet. Still, it was broken 
all the same ; which simply meant that 
of the two he loved madame the better, 
and would have chosen her before the 
other could she have come back ; but 
that failing, this other would do, even 
Josephine’s love being better than no 
love at all. Besides, she had her own 
charms, if of a sober kind. She was a 
sweet - tempered, soft-hearted creature, 
with the aroma of remembrance round 
her when she was young and pretty and 
unattainable : consequently, being unat- 
tainable, held as the moral pot of gold 
under the rainbow, which, could it have 
been caught, would have made all life 
glad. The sentimental rest which she 
and her people had afforded during the 
turbulent times of that volcanic Pepita 
had also its sweet savor of association 
that did not make her less delightful in 
the present ; and when he looked at her 
now, faded as she was, he used to try 
and conjure back her image, such as it 
had been when she was a pretty, blush- 
ing, affectionate young girl, who loved 
him as flowers love the sun, innocently, 
unconsciously, and without the power of 
repulsion. 

Also, she had the aroma of remem- 
brance about her from another side — 
remembrance when she had been ma- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


dame’s chosen friend and favorite, and 
the unconscious chaperon, poor dear! 
who had made his daily visits to Lion- 
net possible and respectable. He pitied 
her a little now when he thought of how 
he had used her as Virginie’s hood and 
his own mask then ; and he pitied her 
so much that he took it on his conscience, 
as a duty which he owed her and the 
right, to make her happy at last. Yes, 
it was manifestly his duty — unquestion- 
ably the right thing to do. The petition 
must be signed, the suppliant raised; 
Ahasuerus must exalt his Esther, his 
loving, faithful, humble Esther ; and 
when inclination models itself as duty 
the decision is not far off. 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

PALM AM QUI NON MERUIT. 

All North Aston rang with the story 
of little Fina’s peril, Josephine’s admir- 
able devotion and Leam’s shameful neg- 
lect — so shameful as to be almost crim- 
inal. It was the apportionment of judg- 
ment usual with the world. The one who 
had incurred no kind of risk, and had 
done only what was pleasant to her, re- 
ceived unbounded praise, while the one 
who was ■ of practical use got for her 
personal peril and discomfort universal 
blame. They said she had allowed the 
child to run into danger by her own care- 
lessness, and then had done nothing to 
save her : ^and they wondered beneath 
their breath if she had really wished the 
little one to be drowned. She was an 
odd girl, you know, they whispered from 
each to each — moody, uncomfortable, 
and unlike any one else ; and though 
she had certainly behaved admirably to 
little Fina, so far as they could see, yet it 
was not quite out of the nature of things 
that she should wish to get rid of the 
child, who, after all, was the child of no 
one knows whom, and very likely spoilt 
and tiresome enough. 

But no one said this aloud. They only 
whispered it to each other, their com- 
ments making no more noise than the 
gliding of snakes through the evening 
grass. 


171 

As for Fina, she suffered mainly from 
a fit of indigestion consequent on the 
shower of £ veetmeats which fell on her 
from all hands as the best consolation 
for her willful little ducking known to 
sane men and women presumably ac- 
quainted with the elements of physiolo- 
gy. She was made restless, too, from ex- 
citement by reason of the multiplicity of 
toys which every one thought it incumbent 
on him and her to bestow ; for it was quite 
a matter for public rejoicing that she had 
not been drowned, and Josephine, as her 
reputed savior, leapt at a bound to the 
highest pinnacle of popular favor. 

It made not the slightest difference in 
the estimation of these clumsy thinkers 
that the thing for which Josephine was 
praised was a pure fiction, just as the 
thing for which Learn was condemned 
was a pure fiction. Society at North As- 
ton had the need of hero-worship on it at 
this moment, and a mythic heroine did 
quite as well for the occasion as a real 
one. 

No one was so lavish of her praise 
as Adelaide. It was really delightful to 
note the generosity with which she eulo- 
gized her friend Joseph, and the pleasure 
that she had in dwelling on her heroism ; 
Josephine deprecating her praises in that 
weak, conscious, and blushing way which 
seems to accept while disclaiming. 

She invariably said, “ No, Adelaide, I 
do not deserve the credit of it: it was 
Learn who saved the child but she 
said it in that voice and manner which 
every one takes to mean more modesty 
than truth, and which therefore no one 
believes as it is given ; the upshot being 
that it simply brings additional grist to 
the mill whence popularity is ground out. 

Her disclaimers were put down to her 
good-natured desire to screen Learn : she 
had always been good to that extra- 
ordinary young person, they said. But 
then Josephine Harrowby was good to 
every one, and if she had a fault it was 
the generalized character of her benevo- 
lence, which made her praise of no value, 
you see, because she praised every one 
alike, and took all that glittered for gold. 
Hence, her assurances that Learn had 
really and truly put herself into (the ap- 


172 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


pearance of) actual danger to save Fina 
from drowning, while she herself had 
done nothing more heroic than take the 
dripping pair of them home when all 
was over — she forgot to add, sit in the 
carriage and scream — went for nothing, 
and the popular delusion for all. She 
was still the heroine of the day, and pal- 
mam qiii 7ion ineridt the motto which the 
unconscious satirists bestowed on her. 

She did not mean it to be so — quite 
the contrary — but wrong comes about 
from good intentions to the full as often 
as from evil ones. Her design was sim- 
ply to be truthful, as so much conscien- 
tious self-respect, in the first instance, 
and to do justice to Learn in the sec- 
ond ; but between her good-natured ad- 
vocacy and Adelaide’s undisguised hos- 
tility maybe the former did Learn the 
most harm. 

The child’s past danger was quite suf- 
ficient reason why Josephine should come 
more frequently than usual to F ord House. 
It was only natural that she should wish 
to know how the little one went on. The 
cold, sore throat, rheumatic fever, mea- 
sles that never came, might yet be al- 
ways on the way, and the woman’s fond 
fears were only to be quieted by the com- 
forting assurance of her daily observation. 
Learn did get a cold, and a severe one, 
but then Learn was grown up and could 
take care of herself. Fina was the natu- 
ral charge of universal womanhood, and 
no one who was a woman at all could fail 
to be interested in such a pretty, caressing 
little creature. And then Sebastian Dun- 
das loved best the child which was not 
his own ; and that, too, had its weight 
with Josephine, who somehow seemed 
to have forgotten by now that little Fina 
was madame’s child — false and faithless 
madame — and was not part and parcel 
of the man she loved, as also in some 
strange sense her own. Madame’s in- 
itial dedication had touched her deeply 
both at the time and ever after ; the like- 
ness of name was again another tie ; and 
that subtle resemblance to herself which 
every one saw and spoke of seemed to 
round off all into an harmonious whole, 
and give her a right which even Mrs. 
Birkett did not possess. 


It was about a week after the accident 
when Josephine went one morning, as 
usual, to ask after Fina, and be con- 
vinced by personal inspection that the 
pretty little featherhead, the child of 
many loves, was well. She was met in 
the drawing-room by Mr. Dundas, who 
when he greeted her took both her hands 
in his in a more effusive manner than he 
had ever permitted himself to show since 
Pepita’s death, save once before he had 
decided on madame and when Joseph- 
ine had one day touched an old chord 
tenderly. 

Holding her thus, he led her to the 
sofa with a certain look of purpose in 
his face, of loving proprietorship in his 
bearing, that made poor fond Josephine’s 
foolish heart knock loudly against her 
ribs. 

Was it then coming at last, that re- 
ward of constancy for which she had 
borne so much suspense, so many de- 
lays, such long dull days and tearful 
nights? Was the rickety idol of her 
whole life’s worship really about to bless 
her with his smiles ? 

She cast down her eyes, trembling, 
blushing. She was thirty-five years of 
age, but she was only a great girl still, 
and her love had the freshness which 
belongs to the cherished sentiment of 
girlhood ripened into the confessed, pa- 
tient, unchanging love of maturity. 

“You have been always good to me, 
Josephine,’’ began Mr. Dundas, still hold- 
ing her hand. 

Josephine did not answer, save through 
the crimson of her telltale cheeks and the 
smile akin to tears about her quivering 
mouth. 

“ I think you have always liked me,” 
he went on to say, looking down into her 
face. 

Josephine closed her hand over his 
more warmly and glanced up swiftly, 
bashfully. Was there much doubt of 
it ? had there ever been any doubt of it ? 

“And I have always liked you,” he 
added ; and then he paused. 

She looked up again, this time a cer- 
tain tender reproach and surprise lying 
behind her evident delight and love. 

“Had not my darling Virginie come 


I HAVE GIVEN YOU A NEW MAMMA, FINA. 



















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THE ATONEMENT 

r 

between us you would have been my 
wife long ago,” said Mr. Dundas, the 
certainty of her acceptance at any time 
of their acquaintance as positive to him 
as that the famished hound would accept 
food, the closed pimpernel expand in the 
sunlight. “1 was always fond of you, 
even in poor Pepita’s time, though of 
course, as a man of honor, I could nei- 
tlier encourage nor show my affection. 
But Virginie — she took me away from 
the whole world, and I lost you, as well 
as herself, for that one brief month of 
happiness.” 

His eyes filled up with tears. Though 
he was wooing his third bride, he did not 
conceal his regret for his second. 

By an effort of maidenly reserve over 
feminine sympathy Josephine refrained 
from throwing her arms round his neck 
and weeping on his shoulder for pity at 
his past sorrow. She had none of the 
vice of jealousy, and she could honestly 
and tenderly pity the man whom she 
loved for his grief at the loss of the wo- 
man whom he had preferred to herself. 
She did, however, refrain, and Sebastian 
could only guess at her impulse. But 
he made a tolerably accurate guess, 
though he seemed to see nothing. He 
knew that his way was smooth before 
him, and that he need not give himself 
a moment’s trouble about the ending. 
And though, as a rule, a man likes the 
excitement of doubt and the sentiment 
of difficulties to be overcome, still there 
are times when, if he is either very weary 
or too self-complacent to care to strive, 
he is glad to be assured that he has won 
before he has wooed, and has only to 
claim the love that is waiting for him. 
Which was what Mr. Dundas felt now 
when he noted the simplicity with which 
Josephine showed her heart while be- 
lieving she was hiding it so absolutely, 
and knew that he had only to speak to 
have the whole thing concluded. 

‘‘And now I have only half a heart to 
offer you,” he said plaintively : ‘‘ the oth- 
er half is in the grave with my beloved. 
But if you care to ally yourself to one 
who has been the sport of sorrow as I 
have, if you care to make the last years 
of my life happy, and will be content 


OF TEAM DUNDAS, 

with the ashes rather than the fires, I 
will do my best to make you feel that 
you have not sacrificed yourself in vain. 
Will it be a sacrifice, Josephine ?” he 
asked in a lower tone, and with the ex- 
quisite sweetness which love and plead- 
ing give to even a commonplace voice. 

‘‘I have loved you all my life,” said 
Josephine simply ; and then dissolving 
into happy tears she hid her face in his 
breast and felt that heaven was some- 
times very near to earth. 

Sebastian passed his arms round her 
ample comely form and pressed her to 
his heart, tenderly and without affecta- 
tion. It was pleasant to him to see her 
devotion, to feel her love ; and though 
he disliked tears, as a man should, still 
tears of joy were a tribute which he did 
not despise in essence if the method 
might have been more congenial. 

‘‘ Dear Josephine !” he said. ‘‘ I always 
knew what a good soul you were.” 

This was the way in which Sebastian 
Dundas wooed and won an honest-heart- 
ed English lady who loved him, and who, 
virtue for virtue, was infinitely his supe- 
rior — a wooing in striking contrast with 
the methods which he had employed to 
gain the person of a low-class, half-sav- 
age Spanish girl, whom he had loved for 
her beauty and who took him for her 
pleasure ; also in striking contrast with 
those he employed to gain Madame de 
Montfort, a clever adventuress, who bal- 
anced him, in hand, against her bird in 
the bush, and decided that to make sure 
of the less was better than to wait for 
the chance of the greater. But Josephine 
felt nothing humiliating in his lordliness. 
She loved him, she was a woman devoid 
of self-esteem ; hence humiliation from 
his hand was impossible. 

Just then pretty little Fina came run- 
ning to the window from the garden, 
where she was playing. 

‘‘Come here, poppet,” said Mr. Dun- 
das, holding out his left hand, his right 
round comely Josephine. 

She came through the open window 
and ran up to him. ‘‘Nice papa!” she 
lisped, stroking his hand. 

He took her on his knee. ‘‘I have 
given you a new mamma, Fina,” he said, 


174 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS, 


kissing her ; and then he kissed Josephine 
for emphasis. “ Will you be good to her 
and love her very much ? This is your 
mamma.” 

‘‘Will you love me, little Fina?” ask- 
ed Josephine in a voice full of emotion, 
taking the child’s fair head between her 
hands. ‘‘Will you like me to be your 
mamma?” 

‘‘ Yes,” cried Fina, clapping her hands. 
‘‘ I shall like a nice new mamma instead 
of Learn. I hate Learn : she is cross and 
has big eyes.” 

‘‘Oh, we must not hate poor Learn,” 
remonstrated Josephine tenderly. 

‘‘ I cannot understand the child’s aver- 
sion,” said Mr. Dundas in a half-musing, 
half-suspicious way. ‘‘ Learn seems to be 
all that is good and kind to her, but noth- 
ing that she does can soften the little 
creature’s dislike. It must be natural 
instinct,” he added in a lower voice. 

‘‘Yes, perhaps it is,” assented Joseph- 
ine, who would have answered, ‘‘Yes, 
perhaps it is,” to anything else that her 
lover might have said. 

‘‘Where is Learn, my little Fina?, Do 
you know.^” asked Sebastian of the 
child. 

‘‘In the garden. She is coming in,” 
answered Fina ; and at the word Learn 
passed before the window as Fina had 
done. 

‘‘ Learn, my child, come in : I want to 
speak to you,” said her father, with un- 
wonted kindness ; and Learn, too, as Fina 
had done before her, passed through the 
open window and came in. 

The two middle-aged lovers were still 
sitting side by side and close together on 
the sofa. Fina was on her stepfather’s 
knee, caressing his hand and Josephine’s, 
which were clasped together on her little 
lap, while his other arm encircled the sub- 
stantial waist of his promised bride, whose 
disengaged hand rested on his shoulder. 

‘‘ Learn,” said the father, ‘‘ I have giv- 
en you — ” 

He stopped. The name which he was 
about to utter, with all its passionate 
memories, was left unsaid. He remem- 
bered in time Leam’s former renunciation 
of the new mamma whom he had once 
before proposed. 


‘‘I have asked Josephine Harrowby to 
be my wife,” he said after a short pause. 
‘‘ She has consented, and made me very 
happy. Let me hope that it will make 
you happy too.” 

He spoke with forced calmness and 
something of sternness under his appa- 
rent serenity. In heart he was troubled, 
remembering the past and half fearing 
the future. How would she bear herself? 
Would she accept his relations pleasant- 
ly, or defy and reject as before ? 

Learn looked at the triad gravely. It 
was a family group with which she felt 
that she had no concern. She was out- 
side it — as much alone as in a strange 
country. She knew in that deepest self 
which does not palm and lie to us that 
all her efforts to put herself in harmony 
with her life were in vain. Race, educa- 
tion and that fearful memory stood be- 
tween her and her surroundings, and she 
never lost the perception of her loneli- 
ness ' save when she was with Edgar. 
At this moment she looked on as at a 
picture of love and gladness with which 
she had nothing in common ; neverthe- 
less, she accepted what she saw, and if 
not expansive — which was not her way 
— was, as her father said afterward, ‘‘per- 
fectly satisfactory.” She went up to the 
sofa slowly and held out her hand. ‘‘You 
are welcome,” she said gravely to Joseph- 
ine, but the contempt which she had al- 
ways had for her father, though she had 
tried so hard of late to wear it down, 
surged up afresh, and she could not turn 
her eyes his way. What a despicable 
thing that must be, she thought — that 
thing he called his heart — to shift from 
one to the other so easily ! To her, the 
keynote of whose character was single- 
hearted devotion, this facile., fluid love, 
which could be poured out with equal 
warmth on every one alike, was no love 
at all. It was a degraded kind of self- 
indulgence for which she had no respect ; 
and though she did not feel for Josephine 
as she had felt for madame — as her moth- 
er’s enemy — she despised her father even 
more now than before. 

Also a rapid thought crossed her mind, 
bringing with it a deadly trouble. ‘‘ If 
Josephine was her stepmother, would 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


175 


Major Harrowby be her stepfather ?” 
They were brother and sister, and she 
had an idea that the family followed the 
relations of its members. She did not 
know why, but she would rather not 
have Major Harrowby for her stepfather 
or for any relation by law. She pre- 
ferred that he should be wholly uncon- 
nected with her — just her friend unre- 
lated : that was all. 

“ Thank you, dear Learn !” said Joseph- 
ine gratefully ; and Learn, looking at her 
with large mournful eyes, said in a soft 
but surprised tone of voice, “ Thank me ! 
— why 

“That you accept me as your step- 
mother so sweetly, and do not hate me 
for it,’’ said Josephine. 

Learn glanced with a pained look at 
Fina. “I have done with hate,’’ she an- 
swered. “It is not my business what 
papa likes to do.’’ 

“Sensible at last!’’ cried Mr. Dundas 
with a half-mocking, half-kindly triumph 
in his voice. 

Learn turned pale. “But you must 
not think that / forget mamma as you 
do,’’ she said with emphasis, her lip 
quivering. 

“No, dear Learn, I would be the last 
to wish that you should forget your own 
mamma for me,’’ said Josephine hum- 
bly. “Only try to love me a little for 
myself, as your friend, and I will be sat- 
isfied. Love always your own mamma, 
but me too a little.’’ 

“You are good,’’ said Learn softly, her 
eyes filling with tears. “ I do like you 
very much ; but mamma — there is only 
one mother^for me. None of papa’s 
wives could ever be mamma to me.” 

“ But friend ?’’ said Josephine, half sob- 
bing. 

“Friend? yes,’’ returned Learn; and 
for the first time in her life she bent her 
proud little head and kissed Josephine 
on her cheek. “And I will be good to 
you,’’ she said quietly, “for you are 
good.’’ She did not add, “And Ed- 
gar’s sister.’’ 

The families approved of this mar- 
riage. Every one said it was what ought 
to have been when Pepita died, and that 
Mr. Dundas had missed his way and lost 


his time by taking that doubtful madame 
meanwhile. Adelaide and her mother 
were especially congratulatory ; but, 
though the rector said he was glad for 
the sake of poor Josephine, who had al- 
ways been a favorite of his, yet he could 
not find terms of too great severity for 
Sebastian. For a man to marry three 
times — it was scarcely moral ; and he 
wondered at the Harrowbys for allow- 
ing one of their own to be the third ven- 
ture. And then, though Josephine was 
a good girl enough, she was but a weak 
sister at the best; and to think of any 
man in his senses taking her as the 
successor of that delightful and superior 
madame 1 

Mrs. Birkett dissented from these views, 
and said it would keep the house togeth- 
er and be such a nice thing for Fina and 
Learn : both would be the better for a 
woman’s influence and superintendence, 
and Josephine was very good. 

“Yes,’’ said the rector with his martial 
air — “good enough, I admit, but con- 
foundedly slow.’’ 

To Edgar, Adelaide expressed herself 
with delightful enthusiasm. She was not 
often stirred to such a display of feeling. 
“It is the marriage of the county,’’ she 
said with her prettiest smile — “the veiy 
thing for every one.’’ 

“ Think so ?’’ was his reply, made by no 
means enthusiastically. “If Joseph likes 
it. that is all that need be said ; but it is 
a marvel to me how she can — such an 
unmanly creature as he is ! such a muff 
all through !’’ 

“Well, I own he would not have been 
my choice exactly,’’ said Adelaide with 
a nice little look. “I like something 
stronger and more decided in a man ; 
but it is just as well that we all do not 
like the same person ; and then, you see, 
there are Learn and the child to be con- 
sidered. Learn is such ah utterly unfit 
person to bring up Fina : she is ruining 
her, indeed, as it is, with her capricious 
temper and variable moods ; and dear 
Josephine’s quiet amiability and good 
sense will be so valuable among them. 
I think we ought to be glad, as Christians, 
that such a chance is offered them.’’ 

“ Whatever else you may be, at least 


176 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


you are no hypocrite,” said Edgar with 
a forced smile that did not look much 
like approbation. 

She chose to accept it simply. “No,” 
she answered quite tranquilly, ‘‘ I am not 
a hypocrite.” 

‘‘At all events, you do not disguise 
your dislike to Learn Dundas,” he said. 

‘‘ No : why should I ? I confess it hon- 
estly, I do not like her. The daughter 
of such a woman as her mother was ; up 
to fifteen years of age a perfect savage ; 
a heathen with a temper that makes me 
shudder when I think of it ; capable of 
any crime. No, don’t look shocked, Ed- 
gar: I am sure of it. That girl could 
commit murder; and I verily believe that 
she did push Fina into the water, as the 
child says, and that if Josephine had not 
got there in time she would have let her 
drown. And if I think all this, how can 
I like her?” 

‘‘ No, if you think all this, as you say, 
you cannot like her,” replied Edgar cold- 
ly. ‘‘ I don’t happen to agree with you, 
however, and I think your assumptions 
monstrous.” 

‘‘You are not the first man blinded by 
a pair of dark eyes, Edgar,” said Ade- 
laide with becoming mournfulness. ‘‘ It 
makes me sorry to see such a mind as 
yours dazzled out of its better sense, but 
you will perhaps come right in time. At 
all events, Josephine’s marriage with Mr. 
Dundas will give you a kind of fatherly 
relation with Learn that may show you 
the truth of what I say.” 

‘‘Fatherly relation! what rubbish!” 
cried Edgar, irritated out of his polite- 
ness. 

Adelaide smiled. “Well, you would 
be rather a young father for her,” she 
answered. ‘‘Still, the character of the 
relation will be, as I say, fatherly.” 

Edgar laughed impatiently. 

‘‘ Society wiU accept it in that light,” 
said Adelaide gravely, glad to erect even 
this barrier of shadows between the man 
of her choice and the girl whom she both 
dreaded and disliked. 

And she was right in her supposition. 
Brother and sister marrying daughter 
and father would not be well received in 
a narrow society like North Aston, where 


the restrictions of law and elemental mo- 
rality were supplemented by an adven- 
titious code of denial which put Nature 
into a strait waistcoat and shackled free- 
dom of action and opinion with chains 
and bands of iron. Perhaps it was some 
such thought as this on his own part that 
made Edgar profess himself disgusted 
with this marriage, and declare loudly 
that Sebastian Dundas was not worthy 
of such a girl as Josephine. His hearers 
smiled in their sleeves when he said so, 
and thought that Josephine Harrowby, 
thirty-five years of age, fat and freckled, 
was not so far out in her running to have 
got at last — they always put in ‘‘at last” 
— the owner of Ford House. It was more 
than she might have expected, looking 
at things all round ; and Edgar was as 
unreasonable as proud men always are. 
With the redundancy of women as we 
have it in England, happy the head of 
the house who can get rid of his super- 
fluous petticoats anyhow in honor and 
sufficiency. This was the verdict of so- 
ciety on the affair — the two extremities 
of the line wherefrom the same fact 
was viewed. 

As for Josephine herself, dear soul ! 
she was supremely happy. It was al- 
most worth while to have waited so long, 
she thought, to have such an exquisite 
reward at last. She went back ten years 
in her life, and grew quite girlish and 
fresh-looking, and what was wanting in 
romance on Sebastian’s part was made 
up in devotion and adoration on hers. 

Sebastian himself took pleasure in her 
happiness, her adoration, the supreme 
content of her rewarded low. It made 
him glad to think that he had given so 
good a creature so much happiness ; and 
he warmed his soul at his rekindled ashes 
as a philosophic widower generally knows 
how. 

Only Learn began to look pitifully 
mournful and desolate, and to shrink 
back into a solitude which Edgar never 
invaded, and whence even Alick was 
banished; and Ed^ar was irritable, un- 
pleasant, moody, would take no interest 
in the approaching marriage, and, save 
that his settlements on Josephine were 
liberal, seemed to hold himself person- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


177 


ally aggrieved by her choice, and con- 
ducted himself altogether as if he had 
been injured somehow thereby, and his 
wishes disregarded. 

He was very disagreeable, and caused 
Joseph many bitter hours, till at last he 
took a sudden resolution, and to the re- 
lief of every one at the Hill went olf to 
12 


London, promising to be back in time 
for “that little fool’s wedding with her 
sentimental muff,’’ as he disrespectfully 
called his sister and Sebastian Dundas, 
but giving no reason why he went, and 
taking leave of no one — not even of 
Adelaide, nor yet of Learn. 







zx:. 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 

OUR MARRIAGE. 

N ot the youngest or prettiest bride 
could have excited more interest 
on her launch into the unknown shoals 
and quicksands of matrimony than did 
many-fleshed, mature and freckled Jo- 
sephine on the achievement of her long- 
desired union with the twice-told wid- 
ower. A marriage of one of their own 
set was a rare event altogether to the 
North Astonians, and the marriage of 
one of the Hill girls was above all a cir- 
cumstance that touched the heart of the 
place as nothing else could touch it — one 
which even Carry Fairbairn on the day 
of her triumph over willow-wearing and 
that faithless Frank had not come near. 
It was “our marriage ’’ and “our bride,” 
and each member of the community took 
a personal interest in the proceedings, 
and felt implicated in the subsequent fail- 
ure or success of the venture. 

Of course they all confessed that it 
was a bold thing for Miss Josephine to 
be the third wife of a man — some of the 
more prudish pursed their lips and said 
they wondered how she could, and they 
wondered yet more how Mrs. Harrowby 
ever allowed it, and why, if Mr. Dundas 
must marry again (but they thought he 
might be quiet now), he had not taken 
a stranger, instead of one who had been 
mixed up as it were with his other wives 
— but seeing that her day was passed, the 
majority, as has been said, held that she 
was in the right to take what she could 
get, and to marry even as a third wife 
was better than not to marry at all. And 
then the neighborhood knew Sebastian 
Dundas, and knew that although he had 
been foolish and unfortunate in his for- 
mer affairs, there was no harm in him. If 
his second wife had died mysteriously. 
North Aston was generous enough not 
to suppose that he had poisoned her; 
and who could wonder at that dreadful 
Pepita having a stroke, sitting in the sun 
178 


I as she did on such a hot day, and so fat 
as she was ? So that Mr. Dundas was 
exonerated from the suspicion of murder 
in either case, if credited with an amount 
of folly and misfortune next thing to 
criminal; and “our marriage” was re- 
ceived with approbation, the families 
sending tribute and going to the church 
as the duty they owed a Harrowby, and 
to show Sebastian that they considered 
he had done wisely at last, and chosen 
as was fitting. 

There was a little mild waggery about 
the future name of Ford House, and the 
bolder spirits offered shilling bets that it 
would be rechristened “Josephine Lodge” 
before the year was out. But save this 
not very scorching satire, which also was 
not too well received by the majority, as 
savoring of irreverence to consecrated 
powers, the country looked on in su- 
preme good-humor, and the day came 
in its course, finding as much social se- 
renity as it brought summer sunshine. 

It was a pretty wedding, and every- 
body said that everybody looked very 
nice; which is always comforting to 
those whose souls ' are stitched up in 
their flounces, and whose happiness and 
self-respect rise or fall according to the 
becomingness of their attire. The vil- 
lage school-children lining the church- 
walk strewed flowers for the bride’s ma- 
terial and symbolic path. Dressed in a 
mixture of white, scarlet and blue, they 
made a brilliant show of color, and gave 
a curious suggestion of so many tricolor- 
ed flags set up along the path ; but they 
added to the general gayety of the scene, . 
and they themselves thought Miss Jo- 
sephine’s wedding surely as grand as the 
queen’s. 

There were five bridesmaids, including 
little Fina, whom kindly Josephine had 
specially desired should bear her part in 
the pageant which was to give her a 
mother and a friend. The remaining 
four were the two Misses Harrowby 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


179 


Adelaide Birkett, as her long-time con- 
fidante, and that other step-daughter, 
more legitimate if less satisfactory than 
Fina — Learn. 

The first three of these four elder 
maids came naturally and of course : 
the last was the difficulty. When first 
asked. Learn had refused positively — for 
her quite vehemently — to have hand or 
part in the wedding. It brought back 
too vividly the sin and the sorrow of the 
former time ; and she despised her fath- 
er’s inconstancy of heart too much to 
care to assist at a service which was to 
her the service of folly and wickedness 
in one. 

She said, “ No, no : I will not come. 
I, bridesmaid at papa’s wedding ! brides- 
maid to his third wife ! No, I will not !” 
And she said it with an insistance, an 
emphasis, that seemed immovable, and 
all the more so because it was natural. 

But Josephine pleaded with her so 
warmly — she was evidently so much in 
earnest in her wish, she meant to be so 
good and kind to the girl, to lift her from 
the shadows and place her in the sun- 
shine of happiness — that Learn was at 
last touched deeply enough to give way. 
She had come now to recognize that 
fidelity to be faithful need not be churl- 
ish ; and perhaps she was influenced by 
Josephine’s final argument. For when 
she had said “ No, I cannot come to the 
wedding,” for about the fourth time, Jo- 
sephine shot her last bolt in these words : 
“Oh, dear Learn, do come. I am sure 
Edgar will be hurt and displeased if you 
are not one of my bridesmaids. He will 
think you do not like the connection, 
and you know what a proud man he is : 
he will be so vexed with me.” 

On which Learn said gravely, ” I would 
not like to hurt or displease Major Har- 
rowby ; and I do not like or dislike the 
connection adding, after a pause, and 
putting on her little royal manner, ‘‘ I 
will come.” 

Josephine’s honest heart swelled with 
the humble gratitude of the self-abased. 
‘‘Good Learn! dear girl!” she cried, 
kissing her with tearful eyes and wet 
lips — poor Learn ! who hated to be kiss- 
ed, and who had by no means intended 


that her grave caress on the day of be- 
trothal should be taken as a precedent 
and acted on unreservedly. And after 
she had kissed her frequently she thank- 
ed her again effusively, as if she had re- 
ceived some signal grace that could hard- 
ly be repaid. 

Her excess chilled Learn of course, 
but she held to her promise ; and Jo- 
sephine augured all manner of happy 
eventualities from the fact that her fu- 
ture step-daughter had yielded so sweetly 
on the first difference of desire between 
them, and had let herself be kissed with 
becoming patience. It was a good omen 
for the beginning of things; and all 
brides are superstitious — ^Josephine per- 
haps more so than most, in that she was 
more loving and more in love than most. 

Yes, it was a pretty wedding, as they 
all said. The bride in the regulation 
white and pearls looked, if not girlish, 
yet comely and suitable to the bride- 
groom with his gray hair and sunburnt 
skin. The two senior maids had stipu- 
lated for a preponderance of warm rose- 
color in the costumes, which suited every 
one. It threw a flush on their faded el- 
derliness which was not amiss, and did 
the best for them that could be done in 
the. circumstances ; it brought out into 
lovely contrast, the contrast of harmo- 
nies, Adelaide Birkett’s delicate complex- 
ion, fair flaxen braids and light-blue eyes ; 
it burnt’ like flame in Team’s dark hair, 
and made her large transcendent eyes 
glow as if with fire ; while the little one 
looked like a rose, the white and crim- 
son petals of which enclosed a laughing 
golden-headed fairy. 

It was admirable all through, and did 
credit to the generalizing powers of the 
Hill, which had thus contrived to har- 
monize the three stages of womanhood 
and to offend none. Even Frank’s fas- 
tidious taste was satisfied. So was Mrs. 
Frank’s, who knew how things ought to 
be done. And as she was the rather el- 
derly if very wealthy daughter of a bar- 
onet, who considered that she had mar- 
ried decidedly beneath herself in taking 
Frank Harrowby, the untitled young bar- 
rister not even yet in silk, she had come 
down to the Hill prepared to criticise 


i8o 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM BUND AS. 


sharply ; so that her approbation carried 
weight and ensured a large amount of 
satisfaction. Edgar, however, who was 
not so fastidious as his brother, thought 
the whole thing a failure and that no one 
looked even tolerable. 

As he had his duty to do by his sister, 
being the father who gave her away, he 
was fully occupied ; but his eyes wander- 
ed more than once to the younger two 
of the bridesmaids proper — those two ir- 
reconcilables joined for the first time in 
a show of sisterhood and likeness — and 
whom he examined and compared as so 
often before, with the same inability to 
decide which. 

He paid little or no attention to either. 
.He might have been a gray-headed old 
sage for the marvelous reticence of his 
demeanor, devoting himself to his duties 
and the dowagers with a persistency of 
good-breeding, to say the least of it, ad- 
mirable. At the breakfast-table he was 
naturally separated from both these fair 
disturbers of his lordly peace. Learn hav- 
ing been told off to Alick, and Adelaide 
handed over to Frank’s fraternal care, 
with Mrs. Frank, who claimed more than 
a fee-simple in her husband, watching 
them jealously and interrupting them 
often. 

That wind which never blows so ill 
that it brings no good to any one had 
brought joy to Alick in this apportion- 
ment of partners, if the sadness bf bore- 
dom to poor Learn. The natural excite- 
ment of a wedding, which stirs the cold- 
est, had touched even the chastened 
pulses of the pale, gaunt curate, and he 
caught himself more than once wonder- 
ing if he could ever win the young queen 
of his boyish fancy to return the deep 
love of his manhood — love which was so 
true, so strong, so illimitable, it seemed 
as if it must by the very nature of things 
compel its answer. 

That answer was evidently not in the 
course of preparation to-day, for Learn 
had never been more laconic or more 
candidly disdainful than she was now ; 
and what sweetness the pomegranate 
flower might hold in its heart was cer- 
tainly not shaken abroad on the sur- 
rounding world. She answered when 


she was spoken to, because even Learn 
felt the constraining influences of society, 
but her eyes, like her manner, said plain- 
ly enough, “You tire me : you are stupid.” 

Not that either her eyes or her manner 
repelled her uncomfortable adorer. Alick 
was used to her disdain, and even liked 
it as her way, as he would have liked 
anything else that had been her way. 
He was content to be her footstool if it 
was her pleasure to put her foot on him, 
and he would have knotted any thong 
of any lash that she had chosen to use. 
Whatever gave her pleasure rejoiced him, 
and he had no desire for himself that 
might be against her wishes. Neverthe- 
less, he yearned at times, when self would 
dominate obedience, that those wishes of 
hers should coincide with his desires, and 
that before the end came he might win 
her to return his love. 

But what can be hoped from a girl, 
not a coquette, who is besieged on the 
one side by an awkward and ungainly 
admirer, when directly opposite to her 
is the handsome hero for whose love her 
secret heart, unknown to herself, is cry- 
ing, and who has withdrawn himself for 
the time from smiles and benevolence ? 
Learn somehow felt as if every compli- 
ment paid to her by Alick was an offence 
to Edgar ; and she repelled him, blush- 
ing, writhing, uncomfortable, but ador- 
ing, with a coldness that nothing could 
warm, a stony immobility that nothing 
could soften, because it was the coldness 
of fidelity and the immobility of love. 

Edgar saw it all. It put him some- 
what in better humor with himself, but 
made him indignant with the Reverend 
Alexander, as he generally called Alick 
when he spoke of him wishing to suggest 
disrespect. He held him as a poacher 
beating up his preserves ; and the gen- 
tlemen of England have scant mercy 
for poachers, conscious or unconscious. 
Meanwhile, nothing could be more de- 
lightfully smooth and successful than the 
whole thing was on the outside. The 
women looked nice, the men were gal- 
lant, the mature but comely bride was 
so happy that she seemed to radiate hap- 
piness on all around her, and the elderly 
bridegroom was marvelously vitalized for 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


l8l 


a man whose heart was broken, and only 
at the best riveted. Edgar performed his 
duties, as has been said, with heroic con- 
stancy ; Mrs. Harrowby did not weep nor 
bemoan herself as a victim because one 
of her daughters had at last left the ma- 
ternal wing for a penthouse of her own ; 
Adelaide talked to Frank with graceful 
discretion, mindful of his owner watch- 
ing her property jealously from the other 
side of the way ; Learn was — Learn in 
her more reserved mood if Alick was too 
manifestly adoring; and the families ad- 
mitted acted like a well-trained chorus, 
and carried on the main thread to low- 
er levels without a break. So time and 
events went on till the moment came 
for that fearful infliction — the wedding- 
• breakfast toast prefaced by the wedding- 
breakfast speech. 

This naturally fell to the lot of Mr. 
Birkett to propose and deliver, and after 
a concerted signaling with Edgar he rose 
to his feet and began his oration. He 
proposed “ the health of the fair bride and 
her gallant groom,” both of whom, after 
the manner of such speeches, he credit- 
ed with all the virtues under heaven, and 
of whom each was the sole proper com- 
plement of the other to be found within 
the four seas. He was so far generous 
in that he did not allude to that fascina- 
ting second whom Mr. Dundas had taken 
to his bosom nearly five years ago now, 
and whose tragical death had cut him 
to the heart almost as much as it had 
wounded Sebastian. At one time nat- 
ural masculine malice had made him 
compose a stinging little allusion that 
should carry poison, as some flowers do, 
sheathed and sugared ; but the gentle- 
man’s better taste prevailed, and for 
Josephine’s sake he brushed away the 
gloomy shadow of the grave which he 
had thrown for his own satisfaction over 
the orange-blossoms. He rose to the 
joyous height of the occasion, and his 
speech was a splendid success and gave 
satisfaction to every one alike. But what 
he did say was, that he supposed the mas- 
ter of the Hill would soon be following 
the example of his brother-in-law, and 
cause the place to be glad in the pres- 
ence of a young Mrs. Harrowby, who 


would do well if she had half the virtues 
of the lady who had so long held the 
place of mistress there. And when he 
said this he looked at Edgar with a pa- 
ternal kind of roguishness that really sat 
very well on his handsome old face, and 
that every one took to mean Adelaide. 

Edgar laughed and showed his square 
white teeth while the rector spoke, blush- 
ing like a girl, but in all save that strange, 
unusual flush he bore himself as if it was 
a good joke of Mr. Birkett’s own imagin- 
ing, and one with which he had person- 
ally nothing to do. More than one pair 
of eyes watched to see if he would look 
at Adelaide as the thong for the rector’s 
buckle ; and Adelaide watched on her 
own account to see if he would look at 
Learn or at her. But Edgar kept his 
eyes discreetly guided, and no one caught 
a wandering glance anywhere : he mere- 
ly laughed and put it by as a good joke, 
looking as if he had devoted himself to 
celibacy for life, and that the Hill would 
never receive another mistress than the 
one whom it had now. 

‘‘I wonder if the rector means Miss 
Birkett?” blundered Alick as his com- 
mentary in a low voice to Learn. 

Learn turned pale : then with an effort 
she answered coldly, ‘‘Why wonder at 
what you cannot know ? It is foolish.” 

And Alick was comforted, because if 
she had rebuked she had at the least 
spoken to him. 

The breakfast soon after this came to 
an end, and in due time the guests were 
all assembled in the drawing-room, wait- 
ing for the departure of the newly-mar- 
ried pair. Here Edgar might have made 
some amends to the two bridesmaids 
whom he had neglected with such im- 
partiality of coldness, such an equal di- 
vision of doubt, but he did not. He s^ll 
avoided both as if each had offended 
him, and made them feel that he was 
displeased and had intentionally over- 
looked them. 

Each girl bore his neglect in a maimer 
characteristic of herself. Adelaide show- 
ed nothing, unless indeed it was that her 
voice was smoother and her speech sharp- 
er than usual, while her smiles were more 
frequent if less real. But then it was he- 


i 82 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


roic in her to speak and smile at all when 
she was verily in torture. Nothing short 
of the worship due to the great god So- 
ciety could have made her control her- 
self so admirably ; but Adelaide was a 
faithful worshiper of the divine life of 
conventionality, and she had her reward. 
Learn showed nothing, at least nothing 
directly overt. Perhaps her demeanor 
was stiller, her laconism curter, her dis- 
taste to uninteresting companionship and 
current small-talk more profound, than 
usual ; but no one seemed to see the 
deeper tinge of her ordinary color, and 
she passed muster, for her creditably. 
In her heart she thought it all weariness 
of the flesh and spirit alike, and wished 
that people would marry without a wed- 
ding if they must marry at all. 

She had not the slightest idea why she 
felt so miserable when every one else was 
so full of the silliest laughter. It never 
occurred to her that it was because Edgar 
had not spoken to her ; but once she con- 
fessed to herself that she wished she was 
away out of all this, riding through the 
green lanes, with Major Harrowby riding 
fast to join her. Even if her chestnut 
should prance and dance and make her 
feel uncomfortable about the pommel and 
the reins, it would be better than this. A 
heavy meal of meat and wine, and that 
horrible cake in the middle of the day, 
were stupid, thought ascetic Learn. She 
had never felt anything so dreary before. 
How glad she would be when her father 
and Josephine went away, and she might 
go back to Ford House and be alone! 
As for the evening, she did not know 
that she would show herself then at all. 
There was to be a ball, and though it 
would be pleasant to dance, she felt so 
dull and wretched now she half thought 
she would send an excuse. Bu\ perhaps 
Major Harrowby would be more at lib- 
erty in the evening than he was now, and 
would find it possible to dance with her, 
at least once. He danced so well I In- 
deed, he was the only partner whom she 
cared to have, and she hoped therefore 
that he would dance with her if she 
came. 

And thinking this, she resolved in her 
own mind that she would come, and un- 


consciously raised her eyes to Edgar with 
a look of such intensity, and as it seem- 
ed to him such reproach, that it startled 
him as much as if she had called him by 
his name and asked him sadly. Why ? 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 

IS THIS LOVE? 

It seemed as if the evening was to 
bring no more satisfaction to the three 
whom the morning had so greatly dis- 
turbed than had that morning itself. 
Edgar avoided the two girls at the ball 
as much as he had avoided them at the 
breakfast, dancing only once with each, 
and not making even that one dance 
pleasant. Under cover of brotherly fa- • 
miliarity he teased Adelaide till she had 
the greatest difficulty in keeping her tem- 
per ; while he was so preternaturally re- 
spectful to Learn, whom he wished he 
had not been forced to respect at all, 
that it seemed as if they had met to- 
night for the first time, and were not 
quite so cordial as sympathetic strangers 
would have been. 

It was only a quadrille that they were 
dancing, a stupid, silent, uninteresting 
set of figures which people go through 
out of respect for ancient usage, and for 
which no one cares. Learn would have 
refused to take part in it at all had any 
one but Major Harrowby asked her. 
But he was different from other men, 
she thought ; and it became her to say 
“ Yes ” when he said ‘‘ Will you ?” if only 
because he was the master of the house. 

Learn had made considerable progress 
in her estimate of the proprieties. The 
unseen teacher who had informed her of 
late was apparently even more potent 
than those, who had first broken up the 
fallow ground at Bayswater, and taught 
her that las cosas de EspaHa were not 
the things of the universe, and that there 
was another life and mode of action be- 
sides that taught by mamma. 

But when Learn thoroughly understood 
the master’s mood, and thus made it clear 
to herself that the evening’s formality was 
simply a continuance of the morning’s 
avoidance, after looking at him once 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


with one of those profound looks of hers 
which made him almost beside himself, 
she set her head straight, turned her eyes 
to the floor, and lapsed into a silence as 
unbroken as his own. She was too proud 
and shy to attempt to conciliate him, but 
she wondered why he was so changed 
to her. And then she wondered, as she 
had done this morning, why she was so 
unhappy to-night. Was it because her 
father had married Josephine Harrowby ? 
Why should that make her sad ? She 
did not think now that her mother was 
crying in heaven because another wo- 
man was in her place ; and for herself 
it made no difference whether there was 
a step-mother at home or no. She could 
not be more lonely than she was ; and 
with Josephine at the head of affairs she 
would have less responsibility. No, it 
was not that which was making her un- 
happy ; and yet she was almost as mis- 
erable to-night as she had been when 
madame was brought home as papa’s 
wife, and her fancy gave her mamma’s 
beloved face weeping there among the 
stars — abandoned by all but herself, for- 
saken even by the saints and the angels. 

Everything to - night oppressed her. 
The lights dazzled her with what seem- 
ed to her their hard and cruel shine ; 
the passing dancers radiantly clad and 
joyous made her giddy and contempt- 
uous ; the flower-scents pouring through 
the room from the plants within and 
from the gardens without gave her head- 
ache ; the number of people at the ball 
— people whom she did not know and 
who stared at her, people whom she 
did know and who talked to her — all 
overwhelmed as well as isolated her. 
She seemed to belong to no one, now 
that Edgar had let her slip from his 
hands so coldly — not even to Mrs. Cor- 
field, who had brought her, nor yet to 
her faithful friend and guardian Alick, 
who wandered round and round about 
her in circles like a dog, doing his best 
to make her feel befriended and to clear 
her dear face of some of its sadness. 
Doing his best too, with characteristic un- 
selfishness, to forget that he loved her if 
it displeased her, and to convince her that 
he had only dreamed when he had said 


183 

those rash words when the lilacs were first 
budding in the garden at SteeF s Corner. 

It was quite early in the evening when 
Edgar danced this uninteresting “square” 
with Learn, whom then he ceremonious- 
ly handed back to Mrs. Corfield, as if 
this gathering of friends and neighbors 
in the country had been a formal assem- 
blage of strangers in a town. 

“ I hope you are not tired with this 
quadrille,” he said as he took her across 
the room, not looking at her. 

“It was dull, but I am not tired,” Learn 
answered, not looking at him. 

“ I am sorry I was such an uninterest- 
ing partner,” was his rejoinder, made 
with mock simplicity. 

“A dumb man who does not even talk 
on his fingers cannot be very amusing,” 
returned Learn with real directness. 

“You were dumb too: why did you 
not talk, if dull, on your fingers ?” he 
asked. 

She drew herself up proudly, more like 
the Learn of Alick than of Edgar. “I 
do not generally amuse gentlemen,” she 
said. 

“Then I am only in the majority?” 
with that forced smile which was his 
way when he was most annoyed. 

“You have been to-day,” answered 
Learn, quitting his arm as they came up 
to her sharp-featured chaperon, but look- 
ing straight at him as she spoke with 
those heart-breaking eyes to which, Ed- 
gar thought, everything must yield, and 
he himself at the last. 

Not minded, however, to yield at this 
moment, fighting indeed desperately with 
himself not to yield at all, Edgar kept 
away from his sister’s step-daughter still 
more, as if a quarrel had fallen between 
them ; and Adelaide gained in propor- 
tion, for suddenly that butterfly, unde- 
cided fancy of his seemed to settle on 
the rector’s daughter, to whom he now 
paid more court than to the whole room 
beside — court so excessive and so patent 
that it made the families laugh knowing- 
ly, and say among themselves evidently 
the Hill would soon receive its new mis- 
tress, and the rector knew which way 
things were going when he made that 
wedding-speech this morning. 


i84 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS 


Only Adelaide herself was not de- 
ceived, but read between the lines and 
made out the hidden words, which were 
not flattering to herself. And to her it 
was manifest that Edgar’s attentions, of- 
fered with such excited publicity, were 
not so much to gratify her or to express 
himself, as to pique Learn Dundas and 
work off his own unrest. 

Meanwhile, Learn, sad and weary, 
took refuge in the embrasure of a bow- 
window, where she sat hidden from the 
room by the heavy curtains which fell 
before the sidelights, leaving the centre 
window leading into the garden open 
and uncurtained. Here she was at rest. 
She was not obliged to talk. She need 
not see Edgar always with her enemy, 
both laughing so merrily — and as it seem- 
ed to her so cruelly, so insolently — as 
they waltzed and danced square dances, 
looking really as if made one for the oth- 
er — so handsome as they both were, so 
well set up, and so thoroughly English. 

It made her so unhappy to watch them ; 
for, as she said to herself. Major Harrow- 
by had always been so much her friend, 
and Adelaide Birkett was so much her 
enemy, that she felt as if he had desert- 
ed her and gone over to the other side. 
That was all. It was like losing him 
altogether to see him so much with Ade- 
laide. With any one else she would not 
have had a pang. He migfit have danced 
all the evening, if he had liked, with Susy 
Fairbairn or Rosy, or any of the strange 
girls about, but she did not like that he 
should so entirely abandon her for Ade- 
laide. Wherefore she drew herself away 
out of sight altogether, and sat behind 
the curtain looking into the garden and 
up to the dark, quiet sky. 

Presently Alick, who had been search- 
ing for her everywhere, spied her out and 
came up to her. He too was one of those 
made wretched by the circumstances of 
the evening. Indeed, he was always 
wretched, more or less ; but he was one 
of the kind which gets used to its own 
unhappiness — even reconciled to it if 
others are happy. 

“You are not dancing?” he said to 
Learn sitting behind the curtain. 

“No,” said Learn with her old disdain 


for self-evident propositions. “ I am sit- 
ting here.” 

“ Don’t you care for dancing ?” he asked. 

He knew that she did, but a certain 
temperament prefers foolish questions to 
silence ; and Alick Corfield was one who 
had that temperament. 

“Not to-night,” she answered, looking 
into the garden. 

“Why not to-night? and when you 
dance so beautifully too — just as light 
as a fairy.” 

“ Did you ever see a fairy dance ?” was 
Leam’s rejoinder, made quite solemnly. 

Alick blushed and shifted his long lean 
limbs uneasily. He knew that when he 
said these silly things he should draw 
down on him Leam’s rebuke, but he nev- 
er could refrain. He seemed impelled 
somehow to be always foolish and tire- 
some when with her. “ No, I cannot say 
I have ever seen a fairy,” he answered 
with a nervous little laugh. 

“ Then how can you say I dance like 
one ?” she asked in perfect good faith of 
reproach. 

“ One may imagine,” apologized Alick. 

“One cannot imagine what does not 
exist,” she answered. “You should not 
say such foolish things.” 

“No, you are right, I should not. I 
do say very foolish things at times. You 
are right to be angry with me,” he said 
humbly, and writhing. 

Learn turned her eyes from him in 
artistic reprobation of his awkwardness 
and ungainly homage. She paused a 
moment : then, as if by an effort, she 
looked at him straight in the face and 
kindly. “You are too good to me,” she 
said gently, “and I am too hard on you; 
it is cruel.” 

“ Don’t say that,” he cried, in real dis- 
tress now. “ You are perfect in my eyes. 
Don’t scold yourself. I like you to say 
sharp things to me, and to tell me in 
your own beautiful way that I am stupid 
and foolish, if really you trust me and 
respect me a little under it all. But I 
should not know you. Learn, if you did 
not snub me. I should think you were 
angry with me if you treated me with 
formal politeness.” 

He spoke with an honest heart, but an 


THE ATONEMENT 

uncomfortable body ; and Learn, turning 
away her eyes once more, said with a 
heavy sigh — gravely, sorrowfully, ten- 
derly even, but as if impelled by respect 
for truth to give her verdict as she thought 
it — “ It is true if it is hard : you are often 
stupid. You are stupid now, twisting 
yourself about like that and making silly 
speeches. But I like you, for all that, 
and I respect you. I would as soon ex- 
ijpect the sun to go out as for you to do 
wrong. But I wish you would keep still 
and not talk so much nonsense as you 
do.” 

‘‘Thank you!” cried the poor fellow 
fervently, his bare bone accepted as 
gratefully as if it had been the sweetest 
fruit that love could bestow. ‘‘You give 
me all I ask, and more than I deserve, if 
you say that. And it is so kind of you to 
care whether I am awkward or not.” 

‘‘ I do not see the kindness,” returned 
Learn gravely. 

‘‘Do you see those two spooning?” 
asked one of the Fairbairn girls, point- 
ing out Learn and Alick to Edgar, the 
curtain being now held back by Learn 
to show the world that she was there, 
not caring to look as if hiding away with 
Alick. 

‘‘They look very comfortable, and the 
lady picturesque,” he answered affected- 
ly, but his brows suddenly contracted and 
his eyes shot together, as they always did 
when angry. He had been jealous be- 
fore now of that shambling, awkward, 
ill-favored and true-hearted Alick, that 
loyal knight and faithful watchdog whom 
he despised with such high-hearted con- 
tempt; and he was not pleased to see 
him paying homage to the young queen 
whom he himself had deserted. 

‘‘Poor Alick Corfield !” said Adelaide 
pityingly. ‘‘He has been a very faithful 
adorer, I must say. I believe that he 
has been in love with Learn all his life, 
while she has held him on and off, and 
made use of him when she wanted him, 
and deserted him when she did not want 
him, with the skill of a veteran.” 

‘‘ Do you think Miss Dundas a flirt ?” 
asked Edgar as affectedly as before. 

‘‘ Certainly I do, but perhaps not more 
so than most girls of her kind and age,” 


OF TEAM DUNDAS. 185 

was the quiet answer with its pretence 
of fairness. 

‘‘Including yourself?” 

She smiled with unruffled amiability. 

"I am an exception,” she said. ‘‘I am 
neither of her kind nor, thank Goodness 1 ^ 
of her country ; and I have never seen 
the man I cared to flirt with. I am more 
particular than most people, and more 
exclusive. Besides,” with the tnost mat- 
ter-of-fact air in the world, ‘‘ I am an old 
maid by nature and destiny. I am pre- 
paring for my metier too steadily to in- 
terrupt it by the vulgar amusement of 
flirting.” 

‘‘ You an old maid ! — you ! nonsense 1” 
cried Edgar with an odd expression in 
his eyes. ‘‘You will not be an old maid, 
Adelaide. I would marry you myself 
rather.” 

She chose to take his impertinence sim- 
ply. ‘‘Would you ?” she asked. ‘‘That 
would be generous 1 ” 

‘‘And unpleasant?” he returned in a 
lower voice. 

‘‘To you ? chi sa ? I should say yes.” 
She spoke quite quietly, as if nothing 
deeper than the question and answer of 
the moment lay under this crossing of 
swords. 

‘‘No, not to me,” he returned. 

‘‘To me, then? I will tell you that 
when the time comes,” she said. ‘‘ Things 
are not always what they seem.” 

‘‘You speak in riddles to-night, fair 
lady,” said Edgar, who honestly did not 
know what she meant him to infer — 
whether her present seeming indiffer- 
ence was real, or the deeper feeling 
which she had so often and for so long 
allowed him to believe. 

‘‘Do I?” She looked into his face 
serenely, but a little irritatingly. ‘‘ Then 
my spoken riddles match your acted 
ones,” she said. 

‘‘ This is the first time that I have been 
accused of enigmatic action. Of all men 
I am the most straightforward, the least 
dubious.” 

Edgar said this rather angrily. By 
that curious law of self-deception which 
makes cowards boast of their courage 
and hypocrites of their sincerity, he did 
really believe himself to be as he said, 


iS6 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


notably clear in his will and distinct in 
his action. 

“ Indeed ! I should scarcely endorse 
that,” answered Adelaide. ‘‘I have so 
often known you enigmatic — a riddle of 
which, it seems to me, the key is lost, or 
to which indeed there is no key at all — 
that I have come to look on you as a 
puzzle never to be made out.” 

‘‘You mean a puzzle not known to my 
fair friend Adelaide, which is not quite 
the same thing as not known to any 
one,” he said satirically, his ill-humor 
with himself and everything about him 
overflowing beyond his power to restrain. 
His knowledge that Miss Birkett was his 
proper choice, his mad love for Learn — 
love only on the right hand, fitness, so- 
ciety, family, every other claim on the 
left — his jealousy of Alick, all irritated 
him beyond bearing, and made him 
forget even his good - breeding in his 
irritation. 

‘‘ Not known to my friend Edgar him- 
self,” was Adelaide’s reply, her color ris- 
ing, ill-humor being contagious. 

‘‘ Now, Adelaide, you are getting cross,” 
he said. 

‘‘ No, I am not in the least cross,” she 
answered with her sweetest smile. ‘‘I 
have a clear conscience — no self-re- 
proaches to make me vexed. It is only 
those who do wrong that lose their tem- 
pers. I know nothing better for good- 
humor than a good conscience.” 

‘‘What a pretty little sermon ! almost 
as good as one of the Reverend Alex- 
ander’s, whose sport, by the way, I shall 
go and spoil.” 

‘‘ I never knew you cruel before,” said 
Adelaide quietly. ‘‘Why should you 
destroy the poor fellow’s happiness, as 
well as Beam’s chances, for a mere pass- 
ing whim ? You surely are not going to 
repeat with the daughter the father’s or- 
iginal mistake with the mother?” 

She spoke with the utmost contempt 
that she could manifest. At all events, 
if Edgar married Learn Dundas, she 
would have her soul clear. He should 
never be able to say that he had gone 
over the edge of the precipice unwarned. 
She at least would be faithful, and would 
show him how unworthy his choice was. 


‘‘Well, I don’t know,” he drawled. 
‘‘ Do you think she would have me if I 
asked her?” 

‘‘ Edgar !” cried Adelaide reproachful- 
ly. ‘‘You are untrue to yourself when 
you speak in that manner to me — I, 
who am your best friend. You have 
no one who cares so truly, so unselfish- 
ly, for your happiness and honor as I 
do.” 

She began with reproach, but she end- 
ed with tenderness ; and Edgar, who was 
wax in the hands of a pretty woman, was 
touched. ‘‘Good, dear Adelaide!” he said 
with fervor and quite naturally, ‘‘you are 
one of the best girls in the world. But I 
must go and speak to Miss Dundas, I 
have neglected her so abominably all 
the evening.” 

On which, as if to prevent any reply, 
he turned away, and the next moment 
was standing by Learn sitting in the win- 
dow-seat half concealed by the curtain, 
Alick paying awkward homage . as his 
manner was. 

Learn gave the faintest little start, that 
was more a shiver than a start, as he 
came up. She turned her tragic eyes to 
him with dumb reproach ; but if she was 
sorrowful she was not craven, and though 
she meant him to see that she disapproved 
of his neglect — which had indeed been 
too evident to be ignored — she did not 
want him to think that she was unhap- 
py because of it. 

‘‘Are you not dancing. Miss Dundas?” 
asked Edgar as gravely as if he was put- 
ting a bona fide question. 

‘‘No,” said Learn — thinking to herself, 
‘‘ Even he can ask silly questions.” 

‘‘Why not ? Are you tired ?” 

‘‘Yes,” answered laconic Learn with a 
little sigh. 

‘‘ I am afraid you are bored, and that 
you do not like balls,” he said with false 
sympathy, but real love, sorry to see the 
weariness of face and spirit which he 
had not been sorry to cause. 

‘‘ I am bored, and I do not like balls,” 
she answered, her directness in nowise 
softened out of regard for Edgar as the 
giver of the feast or for Alick as her 
companion. 

‘‘Yet you like dancing; so come and 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE) AS. 


187 


shake off your boredom with me,” said 
Edgar with a sudden flush. ” They are 
just beginning to waltz : let me have one 
turn with you.” 

‘‘ No. Why do you ask me ? You do 
not like to dance with me,” said Learn 
proudly. 

‘‘No? Who told you such nonsense 
— such a falsehood as that?” hotly. 

“Yourself,” she answered. 

Alick shifted his place uneasily. Some- 
thing in Leam’s manner to Edgar struck 
him with an acute sense of distress, and 
seemed to tell him all that he had hither- 
to failed to understand. But he felt in- 
dignant with Edgar, even though his 
neglect, at which Learn had been so 
evidently pained, might to another man 
have given hopes. He would rather 
have known her loving, beloved, hence 
blessed, than wounded by this man’s 
coldness, by his indifference to what was 
to him, poor faithful and idealizing Alick, 
such surpassing and supreme delightful- 
ness. 

“ I ?” cried Edgar, willfully misunder- 
standing her. “When did I tell you I 
did not like to dance with you ?” 

“This evening,” said Learn, not look- 
ing into his face. 

“Oh, there is some mistake here. 
Come with me now. I will soon con- 
vince you that I do not dislike to dance 
with you,” cried Edgar, excited, per- 
emptory, eager. ^ 

Her accusation had touched him. It 
made, him resolute to show her that he 
did not dislike to dance with her — she, 
the most beautiful girl in the room, the 
best dancer — she, Learn, that name which 
meant a love-poem in itself to him. 

“Come,” he said again, offering his 
hand, not his arm. 

Learn looked at him, meaning to re- 
fuse. What did she see in his face that 
changed hers so wholly ? The weariness 
swept off like clouds from the sky ; her 
mournful eyes brightened into Joy ; the 
pretty little smile, which Edgar knew so 
well, stole round her mouth, timid, flut- 
tering, evanescent ; and she laid her 
hand in his with an indescribable ex- 
pression of relief, like one suddenly free 
from pain.’ 


“ I am glad you do not dislike to dance 
with me,” she said with a happy sigh ; 
and the next moment his arm was round 
her waist and her light form borne along 
into the dance. 

As they went off Alick passed through 
the open window and stole away into the 
garden. The pain lost by Learn had 
been found by him, and it lay heavy on 
his soul. 

Dancing was Leam’s greatest pleasure 
and her best accomplishment. She had 
inherited the national passion as well as 
the grace bequeathed by her mother ; and 
even Adelaide was forced to acknowledge 
that no one in or about North Aston came 
near to her in this. Edgar, too, danced 
in the best style of the best kind of Eng- 
lish gentleman ; and it was really some- 
thing for the rest to look at when these 
two “took the floor.” But never had 
Learn felt during a dance as she felt now 
— never had she shone to such perfec- 
tion. She was as if taken up into an- 
other world, where she was some one 
else and not herself— some one radiant, 
without care, light-hearted, and without 
memories. The rapid movement intox- 
icated her ; the lights no longer dazzled 
but excited her ; she was not oppressed 
by the many eyes that looked at her : 
she was elated, made proud and glad, 
for was she not dancing as none of them 
could, and with Edgar ? Edgar, too, 
was not the Edgar of the dull, prosaic 
every day, but was changed like all the 
rest. He was like some prince of old- 
time romance, some knight of chivalry, 
some hero of history, and the poetry, the 
passion, that seemed to inspire her with 
more than ordinary life were reflected in 
him. 

“ My darling !” Edgar said below his 
breath, pressing her to him warmly, “ do 
you think now that it is no pleasure for 
me to dance with you ?” 

Learn, startled at the word, the tone, 
looked up half scared into his face : then 
— she herself scarcely knowing what she 
did, but instinctively answering what she 
saw — Edgar felt her little hand on his 
shoulder lie there heavily, her figure 
yield to his arm as it had never yielded 
1 before, while her head drooped like a 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


1 88 

flower faint with the heavy sunlight till 
it nearly touched his breast. 

“My Learn!” he whispered again, “I 
love you ! I love you ! my Learn, my 
love !” 

Learn sighed dreamily. “ This is like 
death — and heaven,” she murmured as 
he stopped by the window where she 
had sat with Alick, and carried her half 
fainting into the garden. 

The cool night-air revived her, and she 
opened her eyes, wondering where she 
was and what had happened. Even 
now she could not take it all in, but she 
knew that something had come to her of 
which she was ashamed, and that she 
must not stay here alone with Major 
Harrowby. With an attempt at her old 
pride she tried to draw herself away, 
not looking at him, feeling abashed and 
humbled. “I will dance no more,” she 
said faltering. 

Edgar, who had her hands clasped in 
his, drew her gently to him again. He 
held her hands up to his breast, both 
enclosed in one of his, his other arm 
round her waist. “Will you leave me, 
my Learn ?” he said in his sweetest 
tones. “ Do you not love me well enough 
to stay with me ?” 

“ I must go in,” said Learn faintly. 

“ Before you have said that you love 
me ? Will you not say so. Learn ? I 
love you, my darling : no man ever loved 
as I love you, my sweetest Learn, my 
angel, my delight! Tell me that you 
love me — tell me, darling.” 

“ Is this love ?” said Learn turning 
i away her head, her whole being pene- 
trated with a kind of blissful agony, 
where she did not know which was 
strongest, the pleasure or the pain : 
perhaps it was the pain. 

“Kiss me, and then I shall know,” 
whispered Edgar. 

“ No,” said Learn trembling and hiding 
her face, “ I must not do that.” 

“Ah, you do not love me, and we 
shall never meet again,” he cried in the 
disappointed lover’s well-feigned tone of 
despair, dropping her hands and half 
turning away. 

Learn stood for a moment as if she 
hesitated : then, with an indescribable 


air of self-surrender, she went closer to 
him and laid her hands very gently on 
his shoulders. “I will kiss you rather 
than make you unhappy,” she said in a 
soft voice, lifting up her face. 

“My angel ! now I know that you love 
me !” cried Edgar triumphantly, holding 
her strained to his heart as he pressed 
her bashful, tremulous little lips, Learn 
feeling that she had proved her love by 
the sacrifice of all that she held most 
dear — by the sacrifice of herself and 
modesty. 

The first kiss for a girl whose love was 
as strong as fire and as pure — for a girl 
who had not a weak or sensual fibre in 
her nature — yes, it was a sacrifice the 
like of which men do not understand ; 
especially Edgar, loose-lipped, amorous 
Edgar, with his easy loves, his wide ex- 
perience, his consequent loss of sensitive 
perception, and his holding all women 
as pretty much alike — creatures rather 
than individuals, and created for man’s 
pleasure : especially he did not under- 
stand how much this little action, which 
was one so entirely of course to him, 
cost her — how great the gift, how elo- 
quent of what it included. But Learn, 
burning with shame, thought that she 
should never bear to see the sun again ; 
and yet it was for Edgar, and for Edgar 
she would have done even more than this. 

“ Have you enjoyed yourself, Learn, 
m}^dear?” asked Mrs. Corfield as they 
drove home in the quiet moonlight. 

“No — yes,” answered Learn, who 
wished that the little woman would not 
talk to her. How could she say that 
this fiery unrest was enjoyment? The 
word was so trivial. But indeed what 
word could compass the strange passion 
that possessed her ? — that mingled bliss 
and anguish of young love newly born, 
lately confessed. 

“ Have you enjoyed yourself, Alick, 
my boy ?” asked the little woman again. 

She had had no love-affairs to disturb 
her with pleasure or with pain, and she 
was full of the mechanism of the even- 
ing, and wanted to talk it over. 

“I never enjoy that kind of thing,” 
answered Alick in a voice that was full 
of tears. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS, 


189 


He had witnessed the scene in the 
garden, and his heart was sore, both for 
I himself and for her. 

“Oh,” said Mrs. Corfield briskly, “it 
was a pretty sight, and I am sure every 
one was happy.” 

Had she seen Adelaide Birkett sitting 
before her glass, her face covered in her 
hands and shedding hot tears like rain 
— had she seen Learn standing by her 
open window, letting the cool night-air 
blow upon her, too feverish and disturbed 
to rest — she would not have said that 
every one had been happy at the ball 
given in honor of Josephine’s marriage. 
Perhaps of all those immediately con- 
cerned Edgar was the most content, for 
now that he had committed himself he 
had done with the torment of indecision, 
and by putting himself finally under the 
control of circumstances he seemed to 
have thrown off the strain of responsi- 
bility. 

So the night passed, and the next day 
came, bringing toil to the weary, joy to 
the happy, wealth to the rich, and sorrow 
to the sad — bringing Edgar to Learn, 
and Learn to the deeper consciousness 
and confession of her love. 


CHAPTER XXXV. 

DUNASTON CASTLE. 

It was not a bad idea to continue the 
wedding-gayeties of yesterday evening 
by a picnic to-day. People are always 
more or less out of sorts after a ball, and 
a day spent in the open air soothes the 
feverish and braces up the limp. Where- 
fore the rectory gave a picnic to blow 
away the lingering vapors of last even- 
ing at the Hill, and the place of meeting 
chosen was Dunaston Castle. 

Learn had of course been invited with 
the rest. Had she been a different per- 
son, and more in accord with the gen- 
eral sentiments of the neighborhood than 
she was, she would have been made the 
“first young lady” for the moment, be- 
cause of her connection with the bride- 
groom ; but being what she was — Learn 
— she was merely included with the rest, 
and by Adelaide with reluctance. 


The day wore on bright and clear. 
Already it was past two o’clock, but 
Learn, irresolute what to do, sat in the 
garden under the shadow of the cut- 
leaved hornbeam, from the branches of 
which Pepita used to swing in her ham- 
mock, smoking cigarettes and striking 
her zambomba. One part of her long- 
ed to go, the other held her back. The 
one was the strength of love, the other 
its humiliation. How could she meet 
Major Harrowby again? she thought. 
She had kissed him of her own free will 
last night — she. Learn, had kissed him ; 
she had leant against his breast, he 
with his arms round her ; she had said 
the sacred and irrevocable words, “I 
love you.” How could she meet him 
again without sinking to the earth for 
shame ? What a strange kind of shame ! 
— not sin and yet not innocence ; some- 
thing to blush for, but not to repent of ; 
something not to be repeated, but not 
to wish undone. And what a perplexed 
state of feeling ! — longing, fearing to see 
Edgar again — praying of each moment 
as it came that he should not appear ; 
grieved each moment as it passed that 
he was still absent. 

So she sat in all the turmoil of her 
new birth, distracted between love and 
shame, and not knowing which was 
stronger — feeling as if in a dream, but 
every now and then waking to think of 
Dunaston, and should she go or stay 
away — when, just as little Fina came 
running to her, ready dressed and loud 
in her insistence that they should set off 
at once, the lodge-gates swung back and 
Edgar Harrowby rode up to the door. 
When she saw him dismount and walk 
across the lawn to where she sat — though 
it was what she had been waiting for all 
the day, hoping if fearing — yet now that 
it had come and he was really there, she 
wished that the earth would open at her 
feet, or that she could flee away and hide 
herself like a scared hind in her cover. 
But she could not have risen had there 
been even any place of refuge for her. 
Breathing with difficulty, and seeing noth- 
ing that was before her, she was chained 
to her seat by a feeling that was half ter- 
ror, half joy — a feeling utterly inexplic- 


Ipo 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


able in its total destruction of her self- 
possession to reticent Learn, who hith- 
erto had held herself in such proud re- 
straint, and had kept her soul from all 
influence from the world without. And 
now the citadel was stormed and she was 
conquered and captive. 

Meanwhile, the handsome officer walk- 
ed over the sunny lawn with his military 
step, well set up, lordly, smiling. He 
liked to see this bashfulness in Learn. 
It was the sign of submission in one so 
unsubdued that flattered his pride as 
men like it to be flattered. Now indeed 
he was the man and the superior, and 
this trembling little girl, blushing and 
downcast, was no longer his virgin 
nymph, self-contained and unconfessed, 
but the slave of his love, like so many 
others before her. 

The child ran up to him joyfully. She 
and Edgar were “great friends,” as he 
used to say. He lifted her in his arms, 
placed her on his shoulder like a big 
blue forget-me-not gathered from the 
grass, then deposited her by Learn on 
the seat beneath the cut-leaved horn- 
beam. And Learn was grateful that the 
little one was there. It was sonichow a 
protection against herself. 

“I came to take you to the castle,” said 
Edgar, looking down on the drooping 
figure with a tender smile on his hand- 
some face as he took her hand in his 
and held it. “Are you ready ?” 

Leam’s lips moved, but at the first in- 
audibly. “No,” she then said with an 
effort. 

“ It is time,” said Edgar, still holding 
her hand. 

“ I do not think I shall go,” she falter- 
ed, not raising her eyes from the ground. 

Edgar, towering above her, always 
smiling — the child playing with his beard 
as she stood on the seat breast-high with 
himself — still holding that small burning 
hand in his. Learn not resisting, then 
said in Spanish, “ My soul ! have pity on 
me. 

The old familiar words thrilled the 
girl like a voice from the dead. Had 
anything been wanting to rivet the chains 
in which love had bound her, it was these 
words, “My soul,” spoken by her lover 


in her mother’s tongue. She answered 
more freely, almost eagerly, in the same 
language, “Would you be sorry?” and 
Edgar, whose Castilian was by no means 
unlimited, replied in English “Yes” at 
a venture, and sat down on the seat by 
her. 

“ Fina, go and ask Jones to tell you 
pretty stories about the bay,” he then 
said to the child. 

“And may I ride him?” cried Fina, 
sure to take the ell when given the inch. 

“Ask Jones,” he answered good-na- 
turedly : “ I dare say he will put you up.” 

Whereupon Fina ran off to the groom, 
whom she teased for the next half hour 
to give her a ride on the bay. 

But Jones was obdurate. The major’s 
horse was not only three sticks and a 
barrel, like some on ’em. he said, and 
too full of his beans for a little miss like 
her to mount. The controversy, how- 
ever, kept the child engaged if it made 
her angry ; and thus Edgar was left free 
to break down more of that trembling 
defence -work within which Learn was 
doing her best to entrench herself. 

“ Do you know. Learn, you have not 
looked at me once since I came?” he 
said, after they had been sitting for some 
time, he talking on indifferent subjects 
to give her time to recover herself, and 
she replying in monosyllables, or per- 
haps not replying at all. 

She was silent, but her eyes drooped a 
little lower. 

“Will you not look at me, darling?” 
he asked in that mellifluous voice of his 
which no woman had yet been found 
strong enough to withstand. 

“Why?” said Learn, vainlj^ trying 
after her old self, and doing her best to 
speak as if the subject was indifferent to 
her, but failing, as how should she not ? 
The loud beatings of her heart rang in 
her ears, her lips quivered so that she 
could not steady them, and her eyes were 
so full of shame, their lids so weighted 
with consciousness, that truly she could 
not have raised them had she tried. 

“Why? Look at me and I will tell 
you,” was his smiling answer. 

She turned to him, and, as once be- 
fore, bound by the spell of loving obedi- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


ence, lifted her heavy lids and raised her 
dewy eyes slowly till they came to the 
level of his. Then they met his, and 
Edgar laughed — a happy and abounding 
laugh which somehow Learn did not re- 
sent, though in general a laugh the cause 
of which she did not fully understand 
was an offence to her or a stupidity. 

“Now I am satisfied,” he said in his 
sweetest voice. “Now I know that the 
morning has not destroyed the dream of 
the night, and that you love me. Tell 
it me once more. Learn, sweet Learn ! 
I must hear it in the open sunshine as I 
heard it in the starlight: tell me again 
that you love me.” 

Learn bent her pretty head to hide her 
crimson cheeks. How hard this con- 
fession was to her, and yet how sweet ! 
How difficult to make, and yet how sor- 
ry she vrould be if anything came be- 
tween them so that it was left unmade 1 

“Tell me, my Learn, my darling!” 
said Edgar again, with that delicious tyr- 
anny of love, that masterful insistence of 
manly tenderness, which women prize 
and obey. 

“ I love you,” half whispered Learn, 
feeling as if she had again forfeited her 
pride and modesty, and for the second 
time had committed that strange sweet 
sin against herself for which she blush- 
ed and of which she did not repent. 

“And I love you,” he answered — “fer- 
vently, madly if you like. I never knew 
what love was before I knew you, my 
darling. When you are all my own I 
will make you confess that the love of an 
English gentleman is worth living for.” 

''You are worth living for,” said Learn 
with timid fervor, defending him against 
all possible rivalry of circumstance or 
person. “ I do not care about your Eng- 
lish gentlemen. It is only you.” 

“That brute of a Jones!” muttered 
Edgar as he put his arm round her waist 
and glanced toward the door. 

“No,” said Learn gravely, shrinking 
back, “ you must not do that.” 

“ What a shy wild bird it is !” he said 
lovingly, though he was disappointed. 
And he did not like this kind of disap- 
pointment. “ Will you never be tamed, 
my Learn ?” 


191 

“Not to that,” said innocent Learn in 
the same grave way ; and Edgar smiled 
behind his golden beard, but not so that 
she could see the smile. 

“Ah, but you must obey me now — do 
as I tell you in everything,” he said with 
perfect seriousness of mien and accent. 
“You have given yourself to me now, 
and if I ask you to kiss me you must, 
just as readily as Fina, and let me caress 
and pet you as much as I like.” 

“Must I? but I do not like it,” said 
Learn simply. 

He laughed outright, and — Jones not 
looking — took her hand and carried it to 
his lips. “Is this unpleasant?” he ask- 
ed, looking up from under his eyebrows. 

Learn blushed, hesitated, trembled. 
“ No,” she then said in a low voice, “ not 
from you.” 

On which he kissed it again, and Learn 
had no wish to retract her confession. 

“Now go and make ready to come to 
the castle,” he said after a moment’s 
pause. “ I told you before that you must 
obey me, now that you have promised to 
be my wife. Command is the husband’s 
privilege. Learn, and obedience the wife’s 
happiness : don’t you know ? So come, 
darling ! They were all to assemble at 
two,” looking at his watch, “ and here we 
are close on three ! You do not wish not 
to go now, my pet?” 

“No,” said Learn, with her happy lit- 
tle fleeting smile : “ I am glad to go. I 
shall be with you, and you wish it.” 

“ What an exquisite little creature ! In 
a week she will come to my hand like a 
tame bird,” was Edgar’s thought as he 
watched her slender, graceful figure slow- 
ly crossing the lawn with that undulating 
step of her mother’s nation. “ In a week’s 
time I shall have tamed her,” he repeat- 
ed with a difference ; and he felt glad that 
he had bespoken Learn Dundas betimes, 
and that fate and fortune had made him 
her prospective proprietor. “ She will 
make me happy,” he said as his last 
thought : he forgot to add either assur- 
ance or hope that he should make her 
the same. That is not generally part of 
a man’s matrimonial calculations. 

The confidence of love soon grows. 
When Learn came back to the • seat 


192 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


under the cut-leaved hornbeam, where 
Edgar still waited for her to have the 
pleasure of watching her approach, she 
was not so much ashamed and oppressed 
as when he had first found her there. 
She did not want to run away, and she 
was losing her fear of wrongdoing. She 
was beginning instead to feel that de- 
lightful sense of dependence on a strong 
man’s love which— the third sex 
born in these odd latter times — is the 
most exquisite sensation that a woman 
can know. She was no longer alone — 
no longer an alien imprisoned in family 
bonds, but, though one of a family, 
always an alien and imprisoned, never 
homed and united. Now she was Ed- 
gar’s as she had been mamma’s; and 
there was dawning on her the conscious- 
ness of the same oneness, the same in- 
timate union of heart and life and love, 
as she had had with mamma. She 
belonged to him. He loved her, and 
she — yes, she knew now that she had 
always loved him, had always lived for 
him. He was the secret god whom she 
had carried about with her in her soul 
from the beginning — the predestined of 
her life, now for the first time recognized 
— the only man whom she could have 
ever loved. To her intense and single- 
hearted nature change or infidelity was 
an unimaginable crime, something im- 
possible to conceive. Had she not met 
Edgar she would never have loved any 
one, she thought : having met him, it 
was impossible that she should not have 
loved him, the ideal to her as he was of 
all manly nobleness and grace, given to 
her to love by a Power higher than that 
of chance. 

She was dimly conscious of this deep 
sense of rest in her new-found joy as she 
came across the lawn in her pretty sum- 
mer dress of pearly gray touched here 
and there with crimson — the loveliest 
creature to be seen for miles around. 
Her usually mournful face was brighten- 
ed with an inner kind of bliss which, 
from the face of the Tragic Muse, made 
it the face of a youthful seraph serene 
and blessed ; her smile was one of 
almost unearthly ecstasy, if it still re- 
tained that timid, tremulous, fleeting ex- 


pression which was so beautiful to Ed 
gar ; her eyes, no longer sad and sorrow- 
ful, but dewy, tender, bashful, shone 
with the purity, the confidence, the self- 
abandonment of a young girl’s first and 
happy love: every gesture, every line, 
seemed to have gained a greater grace 
and richness since yesterday ; and as 
she came up to her lover, and laid her 
hand in his when he rose to meet her 
and looked for one shy instant into his 
eyes, then dropped her own in shame- 
faced tremor at what they had seen and 
told, he said again to himself that he 
had done well. If even she should call 
the hounds at a hunt-dinner dogs, and say 
that hunting was stupid and cruel, what 
might not be forgiven to such beauty, 
such love as hers ? 

Yes, he was satisfied with himself and 
with her ; and with himself because of 
her. He had done well, and she was 
eminently the right kind of wife for him, 
let conventional cavilers say what they 
would. He never felt more reconciled 
to fortune and himself than he did to- 
day when he rode by the side of the 
carriage wherein Learn and Fina sat, 
and looked through the coming years to 
the time when he should have a little 
Fina of his own with her mother Learn ’s 
dark eyes and her mother Leam’s de- 
voted heart. 

The day was perfect, so was the place. 
Both were all that the day and place of 
young love should be. The view from 
the castle, heights, with the river below, 
the woods around and the moor beyond, 
was always beautiful, but to-day, in the 
full flush of the early summer, it was at 
its best. The golden sunshine, alter- 
nating with purple shadows, was lying 
in broad tracts on meadow and moor, 
and lighting up the forest trees so that 
the delicate tints and foliage of bough 
and branch came out in photographic 
clearness ; the river, where it caught the 
sun like a belt of silver, where it was 
under the shadow like a band of lapis- 
lazuli, ran like a vein of life through the 
scene, and its music could be heard here 
where they stood ; close at hand the old 
gray ivy-covered ruins, with their stories 
and memories of bygone times, seemed 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


193 


to add to the vivid fervor of the moment 
by the force of contrast — that past so 
drear and old, the present so full of pas- 
sionate hope and love ; while the shad- 
ows of things that had once been real 
trooped among the ruins and flitted in 
and out the desert places, chased by 
laughing girls and merry children, as 
life chases death, youth drives out age, 
and the summer rises from the grave 
of winter. It was a day, a scene, to re- 
member for life, even by those to whom 
it brought nothing special : how much 
more, then, by those to whom it symbol- 
ized the fresh fruition of the summer of 
the heart, the glad glory of newly-con- 
fessed love ! 

This was Team’s day. Edgar devoted 
himself publicly to her — so publicly that 
people gathered into shady corners to 
discuss what it meant, and to ask each 
other if the tie already binding the two 
families was to be supplemented and 
strengthened by another ? It looked 
like it, they said, in whispers, for it was 
to be supposed that Major Harrowby was 
an honorable man and a gentleman, and 
would not play with a child like Team. 

Dear Mrs. Birkett was manifestly dis- 
tressed at what she saw. Though Ade- 
laide made her mother no more a con- 
fidante than if she had been a stranger, 
yet she knew well enough where her 
daughter’s wishes pointed ; and they 
pointed to where her own were set. She 
too thought that Edgar and Adelaide 
were made for each other, and that Ad- 
elaide at the Hill would be eminently 
matter in the right place. She would 
not have grudged Learn the duke’s son, 
could she have secured him, but she did 
grudge her Edgar Harrowby. It would 
be such a nice match for Addy, who was 
getting on now, and whose temper at 
home was trying; and she had hoped 
fervently that this year would see the 
matter settled. It was hanging fire a 
little longer than she quite liked : still, 
she always hoped and believed until to- 
day, when Edgar appropriated Learn in 
this strange manner before them all, 
seeming to present her to them as his 
own, so that they should make no fur- 
ther mistake. 

13 


But if Mrs. Birkett looked distressed, 
Adelaide, who naturally suffered more 
than did her mother, kept her own coun- 
sel so bravely that no one could have 
told how hard she had been hit. If she 
betrayed herself in any way, it was in 
being rather more attentive and demon- 
strative to her guests than was usual 
with her; but she behaved with the 
Spartan pride of the English gentle- 
woman, and deceived all who were 
present but herself. 

Even Edgar took her by outside seem- 
ing, and put his belief in her love for 
him as a fallacy behind him. And it 
said something for a certain goodness 
of heart, with all his faults and vanity, 
that he was more relieved than mortified 
to think that he had been mistaken. Yet 
he liked to be loved by women, and the 
character which he had chiefly affected 
on the social side of him was that of the 
Irresistible. Nevertheless, he was glad 
that he had been mistaken in Adelaide’s 
feelings, and relieved to think that she 
would not be unhappy because he had 
chosen Learn and not herself. 

Yes, this was Team’s day, her one 
spell of perfect happiness — the day 
whereon there was no past and no fu- 
ture, only the glad sufficiency of the 
present — a day which seemed as if it 
had been lent by Heaven, so great was 
its exquisite delight, so pure its cloud- 
less, shadowless sunshine ef love. 

Learn neither knew nor noted how the 
neighbors looked. They had somehow 
gone far off from her : when they spoke 
she answered them mechanically, and if 
she passed them she took no more heed 
than if they had been so many sheep or 
dogs lying about the grass. She only 
knew that she was with Edgar — that she 
loved him and that he loved her. It was 
a knowledge that made her strong to re- 
sist the whole world had the whole world 
opposed her, and that dwarfed the fam- 
ilies into insignificant, almost impersonal, 
adjuncts of the place, of no more con- 
sequence than the ferns growing about 
the fallen stones. Not even Adelaide 
could jar that rich melodious chord to 
which her whole being vibrated. It was 
all peace, contentment, love; .and for 


194 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


the first and only time in her life Learn 
Dundas was absolutely happy. 

The two lovers, always together and 
apart from the rest, wandered about 
the ruins till evening and the time for 
dispersion and reassembling at the rec- 
tory came. The sunset had been in ac- 
cord with the day, golden and glorious, 
but after the last rays had gone heavy 
masses of purple clouds that boded ill 
for the morrow gathered with strange 
suddenness on the horizon. Still the 
lovers lingered about the ruins. The 
families had left them alone for the lat- 
ter part of the time, and they discussed 
now Team’s forwardness as they had dis- 
cussed before Edgar’s intentions. But 
neither Edgar nor Learn took heed. They 
were in love, and the world beyond them- 
selves was simply a world of shadows 
with which they had no concern. 

It had been such a day of happiness 
to both that they were loath to end it, so 
they lingered behind the rest, and tried, 
as lovers do, to stop time by love. They 
were sitting now on one of the fallen 
blocks of stone of the many scattered 
about, he talking to her in a low voice, 
“I love you, I love you,” the burden of 
his theme ; she for the most part listen- 
ing to words which made the sweetest 
music discord, but sometimes respond- 
ing as a tender fainter echo. He did 
not see the eyes that were watching him 
from behind the broken wall, nor the 
jealous ears that were drinking in their 
own pain so greedily. He saw only 
Learn, and was conscious only that he 
loved her and she him. 

Presently he said, tempting her with 
the lover’s affectation of distrust, ‘‘ I do 
not think you love me really, my Learn,” 
bending over her as if he would have 
folded her to his heart. Had she been 
any but Learn he would. But the love- 
ways that came so easy to him were les- 
sons all unlearnt as yet by her, and he 
respected both her reticence and her re- 
luctance. 

‘‘Not love you!” she said with soft 
surprise — ^”1 not love you!” 

‘‘ Do you ?” he asked. 

She was silent for a moment. ‘‘ I do 
love you,” she said in her quiet, intense 


way. ‘‘ I do not talk — you know that — 
but if I could make you happy by dying 
for you I would. I love you — oh, I can- 
not say how much ! I seem to love God 
and all the saints, the sun and the flow- 
ers, Spain, our Holy Mother and mam- 
ma in you. You are life to me. I seem 
to have loved you all my life under an- 
other name. When you are with me I 
have no more pain or fear left. You are 
myself— more than myself to me.” 

‘‘My darling! and you to me !” cried 
Edgar. 

But his voice, though sweet and ten- 
der, had not the passionate ring of hers, 
and his face, though full of the man’s 
bolder love, had not the intensity which 
made her so beautiful, so sublime. It 
was all the difference between the expe- 
rience which knew the whole thing by 
heart, and which cared for itself more 
than for the beloved, and the wholeness, 
the ecstasy, of the first and only love 
born of a nature single, simple and con- 
centrated. 

Adelaide, watching and listening be- 
hind the broken wall, saw and heard it 
all. Her head was on fire, her heart had 
sunk like lead ; she could not stay any 
longer assisting thus at the ruin of her 
life’s great hope ; she had already stay- 
ed too long. As she stole noiselessly 
away, her white dress passing a distant 
opening looked ghastly, seen through the 
rising mist which the young moon faint- 
ly silvered. 

‘‘What is that?” cried Learn, a look 
of terror on her pale face as she rapidly 
crossed herself. ‘‘ It is the Evil Sign.” 

‘‘ No,” laughed Edgar, profiting by the 
moment to take her in his arms, judging 
that if she was frightened she would be 
willing to feel sheltered. ‘‘ It is only one 
of the ladies passing to go down. Per- 
haps it is Adelaide Birkett: I think it 
was.” 

‘‘And that would be an evil sign in 
itself,” said Learn, still shuddering. And 
yet how safe she felt with his arms about 
her like this ! 

‘‘ Poor dear Addy ! why should she be 
an ill omen to you, you dear little flutter- 
ing, frightened dove?” 

‘‘ She hates me — always has, so long 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


195 


as I can remember her,” answered Learn. 
‘‘And you are her friend,” she added. 

‘‘ Her friend, yes, but not her lover, as 
I am yours — not her future husband,” 
said Edgar. 

Leam’s hand touched his softly, with 
a touch that was as fleeting and subtle as 
her smile. 

‘‘A friend is not a wife, you know,” he 
continued. ‘‘ And you are to be my wife, 
my own dear and beloved little wife — al- 
ways with me, never parted again.” 

‘‘ Never parted again ! Ah, I shall 
never be unhappy then,” she murmured. 

A flash of summer lightning broke 
through the pale faint moonlight and 
lighted up the old gray towers with a 
lurid glow. 

Learn was not usually frightened at 
lightning, but now, perhaps because her 
whole being was overwrought and strung, 
she started and crouched down with a 
sense of awe strangely unlike her usual 
self. 

‘‘ Come, we are going to have a storm,” 
said Edgar, whom every manifestation of 
weakness claiming his superior protec- 
tion infinitely pleased and seemed to en- 
dear her yet more to him. ‘‘ We must be 
going, my darling, else I shall have you 
caught in the rain. We shall just have 
time to get to the rectory before it comes 
on, and they are waiting for us.” 

‘‘ I would rather not go to the rectory 
to-night,” said Learn with a sudden re- 
turn to her old shy self. 

‘‘No? Why, my sweet?” he said 
lovingly. *‘ How can I live through the 
evening without you ?” 

‘‘Can you not? Do you really wish 
me to go ?” she answered seriously. 

‘‘Of course I wish it: how should I 
not ? But tell me why you raise an ob- 
jection. Why would you rather not go?” 

*‘I would rather be alone and think 
of you than only see you at the rectory 
with all those people,” she answered 
simply. 

‘‘ But we have had all the people about 
here, and yet we have been pretty much 
alone,” he said. 

‘‘We could not be together at the rec- 
tory, and” — she blushed, but her eyes 
were full of more than love as she raised 


them to his face — ‘‘ I could not bear that 
any one should come between us to-day. 
Better be alone at home, where I can 
think of you with no one to interrupt 
me.” 

‘‘ It is a disappointment, but who could 
refuse such a plea and made in such a 
voice ?” said Edgar, who felt that per- * 
haps she was right in her instinct, and 
who at all events knew that he should 
be spared something that would be a 
slight effort in Adelaide’s own house. 

‘‘ I shall spoil you, I know, but I cannot 
refuse you anything when you look like 
that. Very well: you shall go home if 
you wish it, my beloved, and I will make 
your excuses.” 

‘‘Thank you,” said Learn, with the 
sweetest little air of humbleness and 
patience. 

“How could that fool Sebastian Dun- 
das say she was difficult to manage ? and 
how can Adelaide see in her the possi- 
bility of anything like wickedness ? She 
is the most loving and tractable little 
angel in the world. She will give me 
no kind of trouble, and I shall be able 
to mould her from the first and do what 
I like with her.” 

These were Edgar’s thoughts as he 
took Leam’s hand on his arm, holding 
it there tenderly pressed beneath his 
other hand, while he said aloud, ‘‘My 
darling ! my delight ! if I had had to 
create my ideal I should have madej^ou. 
You are everything I most love and 
again he said, as so often before, ‘‘ the 
only woman I have ever loved or ever 
could love.” 

And Learn believed him. 

Adelaide accepted Major Harrowby’s 
excuses for Miss Dundas’s sudden head- 
ache and fatigue gallantly, as she had 
accepted her position through the day : 
she showed nothing, expressed nothing, 
but bore herself with consummate ease 
and self-possession. She won Edgar’s 
admiration for her tact and discretion, 
for the beautiful results of good-breed- 
ing. He congratulated himself on hav- 
ing such a friend as Adelaide Birkett. 
She would be of infinite advantage to 
Learn when his wife, and when he had 
persuaded that sweet doubter to believe 


196 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


in her and accept her as she was, and as 
he wished her to be accepted. As it was 
in the calendar of his wishes at this 
moment that Adelaide had never loved 
him, never wished to marry him, he dis- 
missed the belief which he had cherish- 
ed so long as if it had never been, and 
decided that it had been a mistake 
throughout. She was just his friend — 
no more, and never had been more. 
He was not singular in his determina- 
tion to find events as his desires ruled 
them. It is a pleasant way of shuffling 
off self-reproach and of excusing one’s 
own fickleness. 

Edgar just now believed as he wished 
to believe, and shut out all the rest. As 
he lit his last cigar, sitting on the terrace 
at the Hill and watching the sheet-light- 
ning on the horizon, he thought with sat- 
isfaction on the success of his life. Spe- 
cially he congratulated himself on his 
final choice. Learn would make the 
sweetest little wife in the world, and he 
loved her passionately. But “spooning” 
was exhausting work: he would cut it 
short and marry her as soon as he could 
get things together. Then his thoughts 
wandered away to some other of his per- 
sonal mg^tters ; and while Learn was liv- 
ing over the day hour by hour, word by 
word, he had settled the terms for Farm- 
er Mason’s new lease, had decided to re- 
build the north lodge, which was ugly 
and incommodious : and on this, some- 
thing catching the end of that inexplic- 
able association of ideas, he wondered 
how some one whom he had left in India 
was going on, and what had become of 
Violet Cray. 


CHAPTER XXXVI. 

IN LETTERS OF FIRE. 

The storm which had threatened to 
break last night still held off, but the 
spirit of the weather had changed. It 
was no longer bright and clear, but sun- 
less, airless, heated, silent — the stillness 
which seems to presage as much sorrow 
to man as it heralds tumult to Nature. 
Learn, however — interpenetrated by her 
love, which gave what it felt and saw 


what it brought — always remembered 
this early day as the ideal of peace and 
softness, where was no prophecy of 
coming evil’^ no shadow of the avenging 
hand stretched out to punish and destroy 
— only peace and softness, love, joy and 
rest. 

The gray background of the heavy 
sky, which to others was heavy and 
gloomy, was to her the loveliest ex- 
pression of repose, and the absence of 
sunlight was as grateful as a veil drawn 
against the glare. If not beautiful in 
itself, it added beauty to other things : 
witness the passionate splendor given by 
it to the flowers, which seemed by con- 
trast to gain a force and vitality of color, 
a richness and significance, they never 
had before. She specially remembered 
in days to come a bed of scarlet poppies 
that glowed like so many cups of flame 
against the dark masses of evergreens 
behind them ; and the scarlet geraniums, 
the bold bosses of the blood-red peonies, 
the fiery spathes of salvia and gladiolus, 
the low-lying verbenas like rubies cast 
on the green leaves and brown earth, the 
red gold, flame-color streaked with lines 
of blood, of the nasturtiums festooning 
the bordering wires of the centre beds, 
all seemed to come out like spires of 
flame or rosettes dyed in blood, till the 
garden was filled with only those two 
colors — the one of fire and the other of 
blood. 

But though Learn remembered this in 
after-days as the weird prophecy of 
what was to come, at the time those 
burning beds of flowers simply pleased 
her with their brilliant coloring ; and she 
sat in her accustomed place on the gar- 
den-chair, under the cut-leaved horn- 
beam, and looked at the garden stretch- 
ing before her with the fresh, surprised 
kind of admiration of one who had 
never seen it before — as if it told her 
something different to-day from what it 
had in times past ; as indeed it did. 

Presently Edgar came down from the 
Hill. He had not told his people yet of 
the double bond which he designed to 
make between the two houses. He 
thought it was only fitting to wait until 
Sebastian had returned and he had 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


197 


gained the paternal consent in the or- 
thodox way. And the false air of secrecy 
which this temporary reticence gave his 
engagement gave it also a false air of 
romance which exactly suited his tem- 
perament in the matter of love. Per- 
haps for the woman destined to be his 
wife he would have preferred to dispense 
with this characteristic of his dealings 
with those other women, her predeces- 
sors, not destined to be his wives. All 
the same, it was delightful, as things 
were, to come down to Ford House on 
this sultry day and sit under the shad- 
ow of the hornbeam, with Learn looking 
her loveliest by his side, and butterfly- 
like Fina running in and out in the joy- 
ous way 6f a lively child fond of move- 
ment and not afflicted with shyness ; 
delightful to feel that he was enacting 
a little poem unknown to all the world 
beside — that he was the magician who 
had first wakened this young soul into 
life and taught it the sweet suffering of 
love ; and delightful to know that he was 
king and supreme, the only man con- 
cerned, with not even a father to share, 
just yet, his domain. 

Edgar, at all times charming, because 
at all times good-humored and not in- 
conveniently in earnest, when specially 
pleased with himself v/as one of the 
most delightful companions to be found. 
He had seen much, and he talked pleas- 
antly on what he had seen, whipping up 
the surface of things dexterously and not 
forcing his hearers to digest the sub- 
stance. Hence he was never a bore, 
nor did he disturb the placid shallows 
of ignorance by an unwelcome influx 
of information. He had just so much 
of the histrionic element, born of vanity 
and self-consciousness, as is compatible 
with the impassive quietude prescribed 
by good-breeding, whereby his manner 
had a color that was an excellent sub- 
stitute for sincerity, and his speech a 
pictorial glow that did duty for enthu- 
siasm when he thought fit to simulate 
enthusiasm. He had, too, that sensitive 
tact which seems to feel weak places as 
if by instinct ; and when he was at his 
best his good-nature led him to avoid 
giving pain and to affect a sympathetic 


air, which was no more true than his ear- 
nestness. But it took with the uncritical 
and the affectionate, and Major Harrow- 
by was quoted by many as an eminently 
kind and tender-hearted man. 

To women he had that manner of 
subtle deference and flattering admira- 
tion characteristic of men who make 
love to all women— even to children in 
the bud and to matrons more than full- 
blown — and who are consequently idol- 
ized by the sex all round. And when 
this natural adorer of many laid himself 
out to make special love to one he was, 
as we know, irresistible. He was irre- 
sistible to-day. He was really in love 
with Learn ; and if his love had not the 
intensity, the tenacity of hers, yet it was 
true of its kind, and for him very true. 

But he was not so much in dove as to 
be unconscious of the most graceful way 
of making it ; consequently, he knew 
exactly what he was doing and how he 
looked and what he said, while Learn, 
sitting there by his side, drinking in his 
words as if they were heavenly utter- 
ances, forgot all about herself, and lived 
only in her speechless, her unfathomable 
adoration of the man she loved. Her 
life at this moment was one pulse of 
voiceless happiness : it was one strain of 
sensation, emotion, passion, love ; but it 
was not conscious thought nor yet per- 
ception of outward things by her senses. 

If yesterday at Dunaston had been a 
day of blessedness, this was its twin sis- 
ter, and the better favored of the two. 
There was, a certain flavor of domes- 
ticity in these quiet hours passed together 
in the garden, interrupted only by the 
child as she ran hither and thither break- 
ing in on them, sometimes not unpleas- 
antly when speech was growing embar- 
rassed because emotion was growing 
too strong, that seemed to Learn the 
sweetest experience which life could give 
her were she to live for ever ; and the 
sunless stillness of the day suited her 
nature even better than the gayer glory 
of yesterday. To-day, too, it was still 
more peace in her inner being and still 
less unrest. The more accustomed she 
was becoming to the strange fact of lov- 
ing and being loved by a man not a 


198 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


Spaniard, and one whom mamma would 
neither have chosen nor approved of, the 
more she was at ease both in heart and 
manner, and the more exquisite and 
profound her blessedness. And who 
does not know what happiness can do 
for a girl of strong emotions, naturally 
reserved, by circumstances friendless, by 
habit joyless, and how the soul of such 
a one seems to throw off its husk like 
the enchanted victim of a fairy-tale when 
the true being that has been hidden is 
released by love ? It is a transformation 
as entire as any wrought by magic word 
or wand ; and it was the transformation 
wrought with Learn to-day. She was 
Learn Dundas truly in all the essential 
qualities of identity, but Learn Dundas 
with another soul, an added faculty, an 
awakened consciousness — Learn set free 
from the darkness of the bondage in 
which she had hitherto lived. 

“You look like another being: you 
have looked like this ever since you told 
me you loved me,” said Edgar, drawing 
himself a little back and gazing at her 
with the critical tenderness of a man’s 
pride and love. “You are like Psyche 
wakened out of her sleep, and for the 
first time using your wings and living 
in the upper air.” 

The metaphor was a little confused, 
but that did not signify. The whole 
image was essentially Greek to Learn, 
and she only knew that it sounded well 
and did somehow apply to her — that she 
had just awakened out of sleep, and was 
for the first time using her wings and liv- 
ing in the upper air. 

“ I have not really lived till now,” she 
answered. “And now things seem dif- 
ferent.” 

“ In what way ?” asked Edgar, smiling. 

He knew what she meant, but he 
wanted to hear her reveal herself. 

She smiled too. “ More beautiful,” she 
said, a little vaguely. 

“As what? I like to be precise, and 
I want to know exactly what my darling 
thinks and means.” 

He said this with his most bewitching 
smile and in his tenderest voice. It was 
so pleasant to him to receive these first 
shy, confused confessions. 


“ The flowers and the sky,” said Learn, 
raising her eyes and looking through the 
garden and on to the gray and narrowed 
horizon. “ I remember when flowers were 
weeds and one day was like another. I 
did not know if the sun shone or not. 
But this year seems now to have been 
always summer and sunshine. The very 
weeds are more lovely than the flowers 
used to be.” 

“ Flowers and sunshine since you knew 
me, my darling ?” 

“Yes,” she answered shyly. 

Edgar glanced at the heavy clouds 
hanging over head, but he did not say 
that he found this gray day singularly 
gloomy and oppressive, and that even 
love could not set a fairy sun in the 
sky. He took up the second clause of her 
loving speech : And 1 am your flower ? 
What a precious little compliment ! I 
hope I shall be your amaranth, my Learn 
— your everlasting flower — if a rough sol- 
dier may have such a pretty comparison 
made in his favor. Do you think I shall 
be everlasting to you ?” 

“ When God dies my love will die, and 
not before,” said Learn, with her grave 
fervor, her voice of concentrated passion. 

Her voice and manner thrilled Edgar. 
Her words, too, in their very boldness 
were more exciting than the most re- 
fined commonplaces of other women. 
It was this union of more than ordinary 
womanly reticence with almost savage 
passion and directness that had always 
been Leam’s charm to Edgar ; neverdie- 
less, he hesitated for a few minutes, think- 
ing whether he should correct her man- 
ner of speech or not, and while loving 
chasten her. Finally, he decided that 
he would not. She was only his lover 
as yet : when she should be his wife it 
would then be time enough to teach her 
the subdued conventionalism of English 
feeling as interpreted by . the English 
tongue used commonly by gentlemen 
and ladies. Meanwhile, he must give 
•her her head, as he inwardly phrased it, 
so as not frighten her in the beginning 
and thus make the end more difficult. 

“You love me too much,” he said in a 
low voice, half oppressed, half excited by 
her words, for men are difficult to con- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


tent. The love of women given in ex- 
cess of their demand embarrasses and 
maybe chills them ; and Edgar had a 
sudden misgiving, discomposing if quite 
natural, which appeared, as it were, to 
check him like a horse in mid-career and 
throw him back on himself disagreeably. 
He asked himself doubtfully. Should he 
be able to answer this intense love so as 
to make the balance even between them ^ 
He loved her dearly, passionately — bet- 
ter than he had ever loved any woman 
of the many before — but he did not love 
her like this : he knew that well enough. 

“ I cannot love you too much,” said 
Learn. ‘‘You are my life, and you are 
so great.” 

‘‘And you will never tire of me ?” 

She looked into his face, her beautiful 
eyes worshiping him. ‘‘Do we tire of 
the sun ?” she answered. 

‘‘Where did you get all your pretty 
fancies from, my darling ?” he cried. 
‘‘You have developed into a poet as well 
as a Psyche.” 

‘‘ Have I ? If I have developed into 
anything, it is because I love you,” she 
answered, with her sweet pathetic smile. 

‘‘But, my Learn, sweetheart — ” 

‘‘Ah,” she interrupted him with a look 
of passionate delight, ‘‘ how I like to hear 
you call me that ! Mamma used to call 
me her heart. No one else has ‘since — I 
would not let any one if they had want- 
ed — till now you.” 

‘‘And you are my heart,” he answer- 
ed fervently — ^“the heart of my heart, 
my very life !” 

‘‘Am I ?” she smiled. ‘‘And you are 
mine.” 

‘‘ But, sweetheart, tell me if, when you 
know me better, you do not find me all 
you think me now, what then ? Will 
you hate me for very disappointment?” 

He asked the question, but as if he be- 
lieved in himself and the impossibility 
of her hatred or disappointment while he 
asked it. 

She looked at him with naive incre- 
dulity and surprise. It would have been 
a challenge to be kissed from any other 
woman, but Learn, with her fire and pas- 
sion and personal reticence all in one, 
had no thought of offering such a chal- 


199 

lenge, still less of submitting to its con- 
sequences. 

‘‘ Find you all I think ?” she repeated 
slowly. ‘‘When I know the saints in 
heaven, will not they be all I think? 
Was not Columbus ?” 

‘‘ But I am neither a saint nor a hero,” 
said Edgar, drawing a sprig of lemon- 
plant which he held in his hand lightly 
across her face. 

‘‘You are both,” answered Learn as 
positively as she used to answer Alick 
about the ugliness of England and the 
want of flowers in the woods and hedges, 
and with as much conviction of her case. 

‘‘And you are an angel,” he returned. 

‘‘No,” said Learn quietly, ‘‘I am only 
the woman who loves you.” 

‘‘Ah, but you must not depreciate your-' 
self for my sake,” he said. ‘‘ My choice, 
my love, my wife, must be perfect for my 
own honor. You must respect me in re- 
specting yourself, and if you were to say 
yes indeed you were an angel, that would 
only be what is due to me. Don’t you 
see?” pleasantly. 

‘‘Yes,” she answered. ‘‘And only an 
angel would be good enough for you.” 

‘‘My sweetest, your flattery is too de- 
licious. It will make me vain and all 
sorts of bad things,” said Edgar with a 
happy smile, finding this innocent wor- 
ship one of the most charming tributes 
ever brought to the shrine of his lordly 
manhood by woman. 

‘‘ It is not flattery : you deserve more,” 
said Learn. Then lapsing into her old 
manner of checked utterance, she added, 
‘‘ I cannot talk, but you should be told.” 

Edgar thought he had been told pretty 
often by women the virtues which they 
had seen in him. Whether they saw 
what was or what they imagined was 
not to the point. If love creates, so does 
vanity, and of the two the latter has the 
more permanence. 

After this there was a long pause. It 
was as if one chapter had been finished, 
one cup emptied. Then said Edgar sud- 
denly, ‘‘And you will be happy at the 
Hill?” lightly touching her face again 
with the lemon-plant. 

‘‘With you anywhere,” she answered. 

‘‘And my mother ? Do you remember 


200 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


when you said one day you would not 
like to be my mother’s daughter ? Ah, 
little puss, you did not know what you 
were saying ; and now tell me, do you 
object to be my mother’s daughter?” 

Learn looked grave. ” I had not thought 
of that,” she said, a certain shadow of 
distress crossing her face. 

” Does the idea displease you ?” he 
asked, in his turn grave. 

“No,” she answered after a short si- 
lence. ” But I only thought of you. Shall 
I be Mrs. Harrowby’s daughter?” 

‘‘Of course. How should you not?” 
he laughed. 

‘‘ And Miss Josephine’s too — two moth- 
ers ? — mother and daughter both my 
mothers ? I cannot understand,” said 
poor Learn, a little hopelessly. 

‘‘ Never mind the intricacies now. You 
are to be my wife : that is all we need 
remember. Is knot?” bending toward 
her tenderly. 

‘‘Yes,’’ echoed Learn with a sigh of 
relief. ‘‘That is all we need remember.” 

So the day passed in these broken 
episodes, these delightful little scenes of 
the fooling and flattery of love, till the 
evening came, when Edgar was obliged 
to go up to the seven-o’clock dinner at 
the Hill. He might sit with Learn, as 
he had done, for nearly six hours in the 
garden, without more comment than that 
which servants naturally make among 
themselves, but if he remained through 
the evening he would publish more than 
he cared to publish at the present mo- 
ment. So he had arranged to go back 
to the family dinner at seven, and thus 
keep his mother and sisters hoodwinked 
for a few hours longer. 

As the time of parting drew nearer 
and nearer Learn became strangely sad 
and silent. Little caressing as she was 
by nature or habit, of her own accord 
she had laid her small dry feverish hand 
in Edgar’s, and had gathered herself so 
much nearer to him that her slight shoul- 
der touched his broad and powerful arm. 

It was a very faint caress for an engaged 
girl to offer, but it was an immense con- 
cession for Learn to make ; and Edgar 
understood it in its meaning more than 
its extent. With the former he was de- I 

VoL. XVII.— 37 


lighted enough : the latter would scarce- 
ly have contented a man with loose moist 
lips and the royal habit of taking and 
having all for which he had a fancy. 
Nothing that Learn had said or done 
through the day had told him so plainly 
as did this quiet and by no means fer- 
vent familiarity how much she loved 
him, and how the power of that love 
was breaking up her natural reserve. 

‘‘It is as if I should never see you 
again,” she said sadly when, looking at 
his watch, he had exclaimed, ‘‘Time’s 
up, my darling ! I must be off in five 
minutes from this. But I shall see you 
to-morrow,” he answered tenderly. ‘‘I 
shall come down in the morning, as I 
have done to-day, and perhaps you will 
ride with me. We will go over some 
of the old ground, where we used to go 
when I loved you and you did not think 
you would ever love me. Ah, fairy that 
you are, how you have bewitched me !” 

‘‘That will be good,” said Learn, who 
did not resent it in him that she was 
compared to a thing that did not exist, 
but adding with a piteous look, ‘‘it is 
taking my life from me when you go.” 

‘‘ You lovely little darling ! I don’t like 
to see you look unhappy, but I do delight 
to see how much you love me,” said Ed- 
gar. ‘‘ But you will not have to part with 
me for very long now. I shall see you 
every day till the time comes when we 
shall never be separated — never, never.” 

‘‘Ah, that time!” she sighed. ‘‘It is 
far off.” 

He smiled, as his manner was, behind 
his beard, so that she did not see it. ‘‘ It 
shall not be far off,” he said gravely. 
‘‘And now,” looking again at his watch 
and then at the sky, ‘‘ I must go.” 

The storm that had been threatening 
through the day was now gathering to a 
head, and even as Edgar spoke the first 
flash came, the first distant peal of thun- 
der sounded, the first heavy raindrops 
fell. There was evidently going to be a 
fearful tempest, and Edgar must leave 
now at once if he would not be in the 
thick of it before he reached home. 

‘‘Yes,” said Learn, noting the change 
in the sky, and unselfish always, ‘‘you 
must go.” 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


201 


They rose and turned toward the 
house. Hand in hand they walked 
slowly across the lawn and entered the 
drawing-room by the way of the window, 
by the way by which she had entered 
twice before — once when she had dis- 
claimed madame, and once when she 
had welcomed Josephine. 

Tears were in her eyes : her heart had 
failed her. 

“It is like losing you for ever,” she 
said again. 

“No, not for ever — only till to-mor- 
row,” he answered. 

“ To-morrow ! to-morrow !”. she replied. 
“There will be no to-morrow.” 

“Yes, yes: in a very few hours we 
shall have come to that blessed day,” he 
said cheerfully. “ Kiss me, darling, that 
I may carry away your sweetest memory 
till I see you again. You will kiss me. 
Learn, of your own free will to-night, 
will you not ?” He said this a little 
tremulously, his arms round her. 

“Yes,” she answered, “I will kiss you 
to-night.” 

She turned her face to him and put 
her hands round his neck frankly : then 
with an uncontrollable impulse she flung 
herself against his breast and, clasping 
her arms tight, bent his head down to 
her level and kissed him on the fore- 
head with the passionate sorrow, the re- 
luctant despair of an eternal farewell. It 
was something that irresistibly suggested 
death. 

Edgar was distressed at her manner, 
distressed to have to leave her ; but he 
must. Life is made up of petty duties, 
paltry obligations. Great events come 
but rarely and are seldom uninterrupted. 
A shower of rain and the dinner-hour 
are parts of the mosaic and help in the 
catastrophe which looks as if it had been 
the offspring of the moment. And just 
now the supreme exigencies to be attend- 
ed to were the dinner-hour at the Hill 
and the rain that was beginning to fall. 

Saddened, surprised, yet gratified too 
by her emotion, Edgar answered it in 
his own way. He kissed her again and 
again, smoothed her hair, passed his 
hand over her soft fresh cheeks, held her 
to him tightly clasped ; and Learn did 


not refuse his caresses. She seemed to 
have suddenly abandoned all the cha- 
racteristics of her former self : the mask 
had fallen finally, and her soul, released 
from its long imprisonment, was receiv- 
ing its gift, not of tongues, but of fire — 
not of healing, but of suffering. 

“My darling,” he half whispered, “I 
shall see you to-morrow. Come, do not 
be so cast down : it is not reasonable, my 
heart. And tears in those sweet eyes ? 
My Learn, dry them : they are too beau- 
tiful for tears. Look up, my darling. 
Give me one happy little smile, and re- 
member to-morrow and for all our lives 
after.” 

But Learn could not smile. Her face 
was set to its old mask of tragedy and 
sorrow. Something, she knew not what, 
had passed out of her life, and some- 
thing had come into it — something that 
Edgar for the moment could neither re- 
store nor yet banish. He pressed her to 
him for the last time, kissed her passive 
face again and again, caught the scent 
of the lemon-plant in her hair where he 
had placed it, and left her. As he pass- 
ed through the gate the storm burst in 
all its fury, and Learn went up into her 
own room in a voiceless, tearless grief 
that made the whole earth a desert and 
all life desolation. 

She did know herself this evening, nor 
understand what it was that ailed her. 
She had only consciously loved for two 
days, and this was the anguish to which 
she had been brought. No, not even 
when mamma died had she suffered as 
she was suffering now. She felt as if 
she had lost him even as she had lost 
her. She did not believe in to-morrow : 
it would never come. She would never 
be with him again as she had been to- 
day. No self-reasoning, feebly aimed at, 
could calm her or convince her of the 
folly of her fears. He had gone, she was 
left, and they were parted for ever. 

She sat by the window desolate, de- 
serted, more alone than she had ever 
been before, because she had lost more 
than she had ever either held or lost be- 
fore. The storm that was raging in the 
sky grew gradually stronger and came 
still nearer, but she scarcely noticed it : 


202 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


it was only as the symphony sounding 
in sad harmony with her unspoken wail. 
Flash followed flash, swifter, nearer, more 
vivid ; the thunder crashed and roared 
as if it would have beaten the house to 
the ground and rent the very earth where- 
on it stood ; the rain fell in torrents that 
broke the flowers like hail and ran in tur- 
bulent rivulets along the paths. Never 
had there been such a furious tempest as 
this at North Aston since the days of tra- 
dition. It made the people in the village 
below quail and cry out that the day of 
judgment had come upon them : it made 
Learn at last forget her sorrow and quail 


in her solitude as if her day of judgment 
too had come upon her. 

Then there came one awful flash that 
seemed to set the whole room on fire ; 
and as Learn started up, thinking that 
the place was indeed in flames, her eyes 
fell on the Tables of the Ten Command- 
ments given her by madame ; and there, 
in letters of blood that seemed to cry 
out against her like a voice, she saw by 
the light of that accusing flash those 
words of terrible significance to her: 

THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER ! 



\ 



*“THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER! 


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CHAPTER XXXVII. 

UNWORTHY. 

T he Storm had passed with the night, 
and the day was bright and joyful — 
almost hard in its brightness and cruel 
in its joy ; for while the sun was shining 
overhead and the air was musical with 
the hum of insects and the song of birds, 
the flowers were broken, the tender plants 
destroyed, the uncut corn was laid as if 
a troop of horse had trampled down the 
crops, and the woods, like the gardens 
and the fields, were wrecked and spoil- 
ed. But of all the mourners sighing be- 
tween earth and sky. Nature is the one 
that never repents, and the sun shines 
out over the saddest ruin as it shines out 
over the richest growth, as careless of 
the one as of the other. 

Edgar came down from the Hill in the 
sunshine, handsome, strong, jocund as 
the day. As he rode through the famous 
double avenue of chestnuts he thought. 
What a glorious day ! how clear and full 
of life after the storm ! but he noted the 
wreckage too, and was concerned to see 
how the trees and fields had suffered. 
Still, the one would put forth new 
branches and fresh leaves next year; 
and if the other had been roughly han- 
dled, there was yet a salvage to be gar- 
nered. The ruin was not irreparable, 
and he was in the mood to make the 
best of things. Do not the first days of 
a happy love ever give the happiest kind 
of philosophy for man and woman to go 
on ? 

And he was happy in his love. Who 
more so? He was on his way now to 
Ford House as a man going to his own, 
serene and confident of his possession. 
He had left his treasure overnight, and 
he went to take it up again, sure to find 
it where he had laid it down. He had 
no thought of the thief who might have 
stolen it in the dark hours, of the rust 
that might have cankered it in the chill 
of the gray morning. He only pictured 




to himself its beauty, its sweetness and 
undimmed radiance — only remembered 
that this treasure was his, his own and 
his only, unshared by any, and known 
in its excellence- by none before him. 

He rode up to the door glad, dominant, 
assured. Life was very pleasant to the 
strong man and ardent lover — the Eng- 
lish gentleman with his happiness in his 
own keeping, and his future marked out 
in a clear broad pathway before him. 
There was no cloud in his sky, no shad- 
ow on his sea : it was all sunshine and 
serenity — man the master of his own fate 
and the ruler of circumstance — man the 
supreme over all things, a woman’s past 
included. 

Not seeing Learn in the garden, Edgar 
rang the bell, and was shown into the 
drawing-room, where she was sitting 
alone. The down - drawn blinds had 
darkened the room to a pleasant gloom 
for eyes somewhat overpowered by the 
blazing sunshine and the dazzling white 
clouds flung like heaps of snow against 
the hard bright blue of the sky ; yet 
something struck more chill than restful 
on the lover as he came through the 
doorway, little fanciful or sentimental as 
he was. 

Learn, who had not been in bed 
through the night, was sitting on the 
sofa in the remotest and darkest part of 
the room. She rose as he entered — rose 
only, not coming forward to meet him, 
but standing in her place silent, pale, yet 
calm and collected. She did not look 
at him, but neither did she blush nor 
tremble. There was something statu- 
esque, almost dead, about her — some- 
thing that was not the same Learn whom 
he had known from the first. 

He went up to her, both hands held 
out. She shrank back and folded hers 
in each other, still not looking at him. 

“Why, Learn, what is it?’’ he cried in 
amazement, pained, shocked at her ac- 
tion. Was she in her right mind ? Had 

203 


204 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


she heard of his former attentions to 
Adelaide, divined their ultimate mean- 
ing, and been seized with a mad idea 
of sacrifice and generosity ? It must 
be with Adelaide, he thought, rapidly 
reviewing his past. He was absolutely 
safe about Violet Cray, who had never 
known his name ; and those later Indian 
affairs were dead and as good as buried. 
What, then, did it meap ? 

“No, not till you have heard me,’’ 
said Learn in a low voice. “And never 
after.’’ 

“ My darling ! what is it ?’’ he repeated. 

“You must not call me dear names: 
I am unworthy,’’ said Learn. “No,’’ 
checking him as he would have spoken, 
smiling with a sense of relief that her 
craze — if it was a craze — went to the vis- 
ionary side of her own unworthiness, and 
was not due to any knowledge of his 
misdemeanors, as she might think them. 
“ Do not speak. I have to tell you. I 
had forgotten it,’’ she went on to say in 
the same tense, compressed manner — 
the manner of one who has a task to get 
through, and has gathered all her strength 
for the effort, leaving none to be squander- 
ed in emotion — “ I was so happy in these 
last days I had forgotten it. Now I have 
remembered, and we must part.’’ 

Edgar was grieved to see her in such 
deadly trouble, for it was easy to see her 
pain beneath her still exterior, but he 
was confident, and if grieved not afraid. 
Leam’s little life, so innocent and un- 
eventful as it must have been, could hold 
no such tremendous evil, could have been 
smirched with no such damning stain, as 
that at which she seemed to hint. Grant 
even that there had been something more 
between her and Alick Corfield than he 
would quite like to hear — which was his 
first thought — still, that more must needs 
be very little, could but be very simple. 
His wife must be spotless — that he knew, 
and he would marry none whose past was 
not as unsullied as new-fallen snow, as 
unsullied as must be her future — absolute 
purity — the unruffled emotions of a maid- 
enhood undisturbed until now even by 
dreams, even by visions. He owed it to 
himself and his position that his wife, 
man of many loves as he was, should be 


this ; but at the worst the childish affec- 
tion of brother and sister, which was all 
that could possibly have been between 
Learn and that awkward young gangrel 
Alick Corfield, could have nothing in it 
that he ought to take to heart or that 
should influence him. Yes, he might 
smile and not be afraid. And indeed 
her delicate conscience was another grace 
in his eyes. He loved her more than 
ever for the honesty that must confess 
all its little sins. Sweet Learn ! Learn 
having to confess ! Learn ! she who was 
almost too modest for an ordinary lover’s 
comfort, needing to be tamed out of her 
savage bashfulness, not to be reproved 
for transgressing the proper reticence of 
an English maid. It was a pretty play, 
but it was only a play. 

“ Come and sit by me and make full 
confession, my darling,’’ he said lovingly. 

“ I will stand where I am. You sit,’’ 
said Learn, without looking at him. 

He seated himself on the sofa. “And 
now what has my little culprit to say for 
herself ?’ ’ he asked pleasantly, putting on 
a playful magisterial air. 

“It is over,’’ said Learn, her hands 
pressed in each other with so tight a 
clasp that the strained knuckles were 
white and started. “You must not love 
me : I cannot be your wife.’’ 

“ Why ?’’ He showed his square white 
teeth beneath the golden sweep of his 
moustache, his moist red lips parted, al- 
ways smiling. 

“ I have done a great crime,’’ said 
Learn in a low, monotonous voice. 

“A crime! That is a large word for 
a small peccadillo — larger than any sin 
of yours merits, my sweetheart.’’ 

“You do not know,” said Learn with a 
despairing gesture. “ How can you know 
when you have not heard ?” 

“Well, what may be its name?” he 
asked, willing to humor her. 

She paused for a moment : then with 
a visible effort, drawing in her breath, 
she said, in a voice that was unnaturally 
calm and low, “I killed madame.” 

“Learn !” cried Edgar, “how can you 
talk such nonsense ? The thing is grow- 
ing beyond a joke. Unsay your words : 
they are a wrong done to fiieT 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


1 

205 


He had started to his feet while he 
spoke, and now stood before her with a 
strangely scared and startled face. Nat- 
urally, as such a man would, he was res- 
olute not to accept such a terrible confes- 
sion, and one so unlikely, so impossible ; 
but something in the girl’s voice and 
manner, something in its sad, still real- 
ity, seemed to overpower his determina- 
tion to find this simply a bad joke which 
she was playing off on his credulity. And 
then the thing fitted only too well. He 
had heard half a dozen times of Madame 
de Montfort’s sudden death, and how very 
strange it was that the draught which she 
had taken so often with impunity before 
should have been found so laden with 
prussic acid on the first night of her home- 
coming as to kill her in an instant — how 
strange, too, that not the strictest search 
or inquiry could come upon a trace of 
such poison bought or possessed by any 
member of the family, for what police- 
officer would look to find a sixty-minim 
bottle of prussic acid concealed among 
the coils of a young girl’s hair? And 
when Learn said in that quiet if desperate 
manner that it was she who had killed 
madame, her words made the whole mys- 
tery clear and solved the as yet unsolved 
problem. 

Nevertheless, he would not believe her, 
but said again, passionately, “ Unsay your 
words, Learn : they offend me.” 

“I cannot,” said Learn. 

He laughed scornfully. ‘‘ Kill Madame 
de Montfort. Absurd ! You could not. 
It was impossible for a girl like you to kill 
any one,” he cried in broken sentences. 
‘‘How could you do such a thing. Learn, 
and not be found out ? Silly child ! you 
are raving.” 

‘‘ I put poison into the bottle, and she 
died,” said Learn in a half whisper. 

‘‘ Learn ! you a murderess !” 

She quivered at the word, at the tone 
of loathing, of abhorrence, of almost ter- 
ror, in which he said it, but she held her 
terrible ground. She had begun her 
martyrdom, her agony of atonement for 
the sake of truth and love, and she must 
go through now to the end. “Yes,” she 
said, ‘‘ I am a murderess. Now you know 
all, and why you must not love me.” 


‘‘I cannot believe you,” he pleaded 
helplessly. ” It is too horrible. My dar- 
ling, say that you have told me this to 
try me — that it is not true, and that you 
are still my own, my very own, my pure 
and sinless Learn.” 

He knelt at her feet, clasping her waist. 
He was not of those who, like Alick, 
could bear the sin of the beloved as the 
sacrifice of pride, of self, of soul to that 
love. He himself might be stained from 
head to heel with the soil of sin, but his 
wife must be, as has been said, without 
flaw or blemish, immaculate and free 
from fault. Any lapse, involving the 
loss of repute should it ever be made 
public, would have been the death-knell 
of his hopes, the requiem of his love ; but 
such an infamy as this ! If true it was 
only too final. 

‘‘Oh, no! no! do not do that,” cried 
Learn, trying to unclasp his hands. “ Do 
not kneel to me. I ought to kneel to 
you,” she added with a little cry that 
struck with more than pity to Edgar’s 
heart, and that nearly broke her down 
for so much relaxing of the strain, so 
much yielding to her grief, as it included. 

‘‘Learn, tell me you are joking — tell 
me that you did not do this awful thing,” 
he cried again, his handsome face, blanch- 
ed and drawn, upturned to her in agony. 

She put her hands over her eyes. ‘‘ I 
cannot lie to you,” she said. ‘‘And I 
must not degrade you. Do not touch 
me : I am not good enough to be touch- 
ed by you.” 

He loosened his arms, and she shrank 
from him almost as if she faded away. 

“Why did you deceive me ?” he groan- 
ed. ‘‘You should not have let me love 
you, knowing the truth.” 

‘‘ I did not know that you loved me, 
or that I loved you, till that night,” she 
pleaded piteously. ‘‘ If I had known I 
would have prevented it. I have told 
you as soon as I remembered.” 

‘‘You have broken my heart,” he cried, 
flinging himself on the sofa, his face bur- 
ied in the cushions. And then, strong 
manias he was, a brave soldier and an 
English country gentleman, he burst into 
a passion of tears that shook him as the 
storm had shaken the earth last night — 


206 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


tears that were the culmination of his 
agony, not its relief. 

Learn stood by him as pale as the shat- 
tered lilies in the garden. What could 
she do ? How could she comfort him ? 
Tainted and dishonored, she dared not 
even lay her hand on his — her infamous 
and murderous hand, and he so pure 
and noble ! Neither could she pray for 
him, nor yet for herself. Pray ? to 
whom ? To God ? God had turned His 
face away from her, even as her lover 
had now turned away his : He was an- 
gry with her, and still unappeased. She 
dared not pray to Him, and He would 
not hear her if she did. The saints were 
no longer the familiar and parental de- 
ities, grave and helpful, to whom she 
could refer all her sorrows and perplex- 
ities, as in earlier times, sure of speedy 
succor. The teaching of the later days 
had destroyed the simple fetichism of 
childhood ; and now — afraid of God, by 
whom she was unforgiven ; the saints 
swept out of her spiritual life lijce those 
mist- wreaths of morning which were once 
taken for solid towers and impregnable 
fortresses; the Holy Mother vanished 
with the rest ; all spiritual help a myth, 
all spiritual consolation gone — how could 
she pray ? Lonely as her life had been 
since mamma died, it had never been so 
lonely as now, when she felt that God 
had abandoned her, and that she had sac- 
rificed her lover to her sense of truth and 
honor and what was due to his nobility. 

She stood by him and watched his 
passionate outburst with anguish infi- 
nitely more intense than his own. To 
have caused him this sorrow was worse 
than to have endured it for herself. 
There was no sacrifice of self that she 
could not have made for his good. 
Spaniard as she was, she would have 
been above jealousy if another woman 
would have made him happier than she ; 
and if her death would have given him 
gain or joy, she would have died for him 
as another would have lived. Yet it was 
she, and she only, who was causing him 
this pain, who was destroying his happi- 
ness and breaking his heart. 

She dared not speak nor move. It 
took all the strength she drew from silence 


to keep her from breaking into a more 
terrible storm of grief than even that 
into which he had fallen. She dared not 
make a sign, but simply stood there, doing 
her best to bear her heavy burden to the 
end. The only feeling that she had for 
herself was that it was cruel not to let 
her die, and why did not mute anguish 
kill her ? 

F or the rest, she knew that she had done 
the thing that was right, however hard. It 
was not fitting that she should be his wife ; 
and it was better that he should suffer 
for the moment than be degraded for all 
time by association with one so shame- 
ful, so dishonored, as herself. 

Presently, Edgar cleared his eyes and 
lifted up his face. He was angry with 
himself for this unmanly burst of feel- 
ing, and because angry with himself dis- 
posed for the moment to be hard on her. 
She was standing there in exactly the 
same spot and just the same attitude as 
before, her head a little bent, her hands 
twined in each other, her eyes with the 
pleading, frightened look of confession 
turned timidly to him ; but as he raised 
himself from the sofa, pushing back his 
hair and striding to the window as if to 
hide the fact of his having shed tears, 
she turned her eyes to the floor. She 
was beginning to feel now that she must 
not even look at him. The gulf that 
separated them, dug by her own inefface- 
able crime, w’as so deep, the distance so 
wide ! ^ 

A painful silence fell between them : 
then Edgar, not looking at her, said in 
a constrained voice, “ I will keep your 
dreadful secret. Learn, sacredly for ever. 
You feel sure of that, I hope. But, as 
you say, we must part. I do not pre- 
tend to be better than other men, but I 
could not take as my wife one who had 
been guilty of such an awful crime as 
this.” 

“No,” said Learn, her parched lips 
scarcely able to form a word at all. 

‘‘Your secret will be safe with me,” he 
repeated. 

She did not reply. In giving up him- 
self she had given up all that made life 
lovely, and the refuse might as well go 
as not. 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


“ But we must part.” 

“Yes,” said Learn. 

He turned back to the window, des- 
perately troubled. He did really love 
her, passionately, sincerely. He longed 
at this very moment to take her in his 
arms and tell her that he would accept 
her crime if only he might have herself. 
Had he not been the master of the Hill 
and a Harrowby he would have done so, 
but the master of the Hill and the head 
of the house of Harrowby had a charac- 
ter to maintain and a social ideal to keep 
pure. He could not bring into such a 
home as his, present to his mother as 
her daughter, to his sisters as their sister, 
a girl who by her own confession was a 
murderess — a girl who, if the law had its 
due, would be hanged by the neck in the 
precincts of the county jail till she was 
dead. He might have been sinful enough 
in his own life, in the ordinary way of 
men — and truly there were passages in 
his past that would scarcely bear the 
light — but what were the worst of his 
misdemeanors compared with this awful 
crime? No: he must resolutely crush 
the last lingering impulse of tenderness, 
and leave her to work through her own 
tribulation, as he also must work through 
his. 

“ But we must part,” he said for a third 
time. 

Her lips quivered. She did not an- 
swer, only bent her head in sign of ac- 
quiescence. 

” It is hard to say it, harder still to do; 
and I who loved you so dearly !” cried 
Edgar with the angry despair of a man 
forced against himself to give up his 
desire. 

She put up her hands. ‘‘ Don’t !” she 
said with a sharp ay. ” I cannot bear 
to hear about your love.” 

He gave a sudden sob. Her love for 
him was very precious to him — his for 
her very strong. 

‘‘ Why did you tell me ?” he then said. 
“And yet you did the right thing to tell 
me: I was wrong to say that. It was 
good of you, Learn — noble, like your- 
self.” 

“ I love you. That is not being noble,” 
she answered slowly and with infinite pa- 


207 

thos. “I could not have deceived you 
after I remembered.” 

“You are too noble to deceive,” he 
said, holding out his hand. 

Learn turned aWay. “ I am not fit to 
touch your hand,” she said, the very 
pride of contrition in her voice — pride 
for him, if humiliation for herself. 

“For this once,” he pleaded. 

“I am unworthy,” she answered. 

At this moment little Fina came jump- 
ing into the room. She had in her hand 
a rose-colored scarf that had once been 
poor madame’s, and which the nurse, 
turning out an old box of hers, had found 
and given to the child. 

After she had kissed Edgar, played 
with his breloques, looked at the works 
of his watch, plaited his beard into three 
strings, and done all that she generally 
did in the way of welcome, she shook 
out the gauze scarf over her dress. 

“ This was mamma’s — my own mam- 
ma’s,” she said. “Learn will never tell 
me about mamma : you tell me. Major 
Harrowby,” coaxingly. 

“ I cannot : I did not know her,” said 
Edgar in an altered voice, while Learn 
looked as if her judgment had come, but 
bore it as she had borne all the rest, res- 
olutely. 

“I want to hear about mamma, and 
who killed her,” pouted Fina. 

“ Hush, Fina,” said Learn in an agony : 
“you must not talk.” 

“You always say that. Learn, when I 
want to hear about mamma,” was the 
child’s petulant reply. 

“Go away now, dear little Fina,” said 
Edgar, who felt all that Learn must feel 
at these inopportune words, and who, 
moreover, weak as he was in this direc- 
tion, was longing for one last caress. 

“ I will go and send her nurse,” said 
Learn, half staggering to the door. 

Had anything been wanting to show 
her the impossibility of their marriage, 
this incident of Fina’s random but incis- 
ive words would have been enough. 

“Learn! not one word more ?” he ask- 
ed as he stood against the door, holding 
the handle in his hand. 

“No,” she said hopelessly. “What 
words can we have together?” 


2o8 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM BUND AS. 


“ And we are parting like this, and for 
ever ?” 

“For ever. Yes, it has to be for ever,” 
she answered almost mechanically. 

“Learn, why did you love me?” he 
cried, taking her hands in his and keep- 
ing them. 

“How could I help it? Who would 
not love you ?“ she answered. 

Again he gave a sudden heavy sob, 
and again the poor pale, tortured face 
reflected the pain it witnessed. 

“Good-bye!” she then said, drawing 
her hands from his. “ Remember only, 
when you blame me, that I told you, not 
to let you be degraded. And forgive me 
before I die, for I loved you — ah, better 
than my own life !” 

With a sudden impulse she stooped 
forward, took back his right hand in both 
of hers, pressed it to her bosom, kissed it 
passionately again and again, then turn- 
ed with one faint, half-suppressed moan, 
and left him. And as he heard her light 
feet cross the hall, wearily, heavily, as the 
feet of a mourner dragging by the grave 
of the beloved, he knew that his dream 
of love was over. But, with the strange 
satire of the senses in moments of sor- 
row, noting ever the most trivial things, 
Edgar noted specially the powerful per- 
fume of a spray of lemon-plant which she 
bruised as she pressed his hand against 
her breast. 

That evening Edgar Harrowby went 
down to the rectory. He was strong 
enough in physique and in some phases 
of will, but he was not strong all through, 
and he had never been able to face unas- 
sisted the first desolation of a love-disap- 
pointment. 

Adelaide, in a picturesque dress and 
her most becoming mood, welcomed him 
with careful cordiality as a prodigal whose 
husks, clinging about his coat, were to be 
handled tenderly as if they were pearls. 
She saw that something was gravely 
wrong, and she grasped the line of con- 
nection if she did not understand the 
issue ; but, mindful of the doctrine of 
letting well alone — also of that of catch- 
ing a heart at the rebound — she made 
no allusion in the beginning, but let her 
curiosity gnaw her like the Spartan boy’s 


fox without making a sign. At last, how- 
ever, her curiosity became impatience, 
and her impatience conquered her re- 
serve. She was clever in her generation 
and fairly self-controlled, but she was 
only a woman, after all. 

“Arid when did you see that eccentric 
little lady. Miss Learn ?” she asked with 
a smile — not a bitter smile, merely one 
of careless amusement, as if Learn was 
acknowledged to be a comical subject of 
conversation and one naturally provok- 
ing a smile. 

“ Dear Adelaide,” said Edgar, not look- 
ing at her, but speaking with unusual 
earnestness, “do not speak ill of Learn 
Dundas — neither to me nor to any one 
else. I ask it as a favor.” 

Adelaide turned pale. “ Tell me only 
one thing, Edgar : are you going to mar- 
ry her?” she asked, her manner as 
earnest as his own, but with a different 
meaning. 

“No. Marry her? Good God, no!” 
was his vehement reply. Then more 
tenderly : “ But for all that do not speak 
ill of her. Will you promise, dear, good 
friend ?” 

“Yes, I will promise,” she answered 
with what was for her fervor and a sud- 
den look of intense relief. “ I never will 
again, Edgar ; and I am sorry if I have 
hurt you at any time by what I may have 
said. I did not mean to do so.” 

“ No, I know you did not. I can ap- 
preciate your motives, and they were 
good,” Edgar answered with emotion ; 
and then their two pairs of fine blue eyes 
met, and both pairs were moist. 

This was just at the moment when 
Learn, pale, rigid as a statue, thickly 
veiled, and holding a box in her hand, 
met Mr. Gryce in Stqel’s Wood, he hav- 
ing gone to catch such rare specimens of 
sleeping lepidoptera as the place afforded 
and his eyes could discern. 


CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

BLOITED OUT. 

Gone ! no one knew where. Gone in 
the night like a falling star, like a pass- 
ing cloud — gone and left no trace, van- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


209 


ished like the sunshine of yesterday or 
the flowers of last spring ! No one knew 
what had become of her, and no one 
knew where to look for her ; for the sole 
information gathered by the scared neigh- 
bors was, that Learn Dundas was miss- 
ing and no one had seen her go. 

She was thought by some to have sim- 
ply run away after the manner of undis- 
ciplined youth aiming at mock heroism ; 
but where, or with whom ? for, said the 
keen-eyed women and large - mouthed 
men, incredulous of maiden meditation 
fancy free, a pretty young thing of nine- 
teen would never have left her comfort- 
able home, her father, friends and good 
name, without some lover stirring in the 
matter. And this lover was just the 
missing link not to be found anywhere. 
Others said she had drowned herself ; 
but here, again, Why? Young girls do 
not give up their precious freight of hope 
in love and present joy in youth for a 
trifling ailment or a temporary annoy- 
ance. And nothing worse than either 
could have befallen Learn, said the rea- 
soners, putting their little twos and twos 
together and totting up the items with 
the serene accuracy of spiritual arithme- 
ticians, dealing with human emotion as 
if it was a sum in long division which 
any schoolboy could calculate. 

Edgar Harrowby, however, who came 
forward manfully enough to say when 
and where — if not how — he had last 
seen Miss Dundas, leant to the side of 
the believers in suicide, and on his own 
responsibility ordered the Broad to be 
dragged. Which looked ugly, said a 
few of the rasher spirits in the village, 
cherishing suspicion of their betters as 
the birthright which had never had a 
chance of being bartered for a mess of 
pottage ; while the more contemptuous, 
critical after the event, gave it as their 
opinion that the major had a bee in his 
bonnet somewhere, for what gentleman 
in his seven sane senses would have look- 
ed for such a mare’s nest as Miss Learn 
Dundas lying among the bulrushes of 
the Broad? Drowned herself? No: it 
was no drowning of herself that had 
come to little miss, be sure of that. 

What, however, had come to her no 

14 


one knew. The fact only was certain : 
she had gone, and no one had met her 
coming or seen her going, and for all 
trace left she might as well have melted 
into air like one of the fairy women of 
romance. To be sure, the servants had 
heard her in her room in the early even- 
ing, and she had refused the tea which 
they had brought her, and told them, 
through the closed door, that she wanted 
nothing more that night. So they left 
her to herself, supposing her to be in one 
of her queer moods, to which they were 
used to give but scant heed, and not 
thinking more about her. The next 
morning she was missing, but when she 
had gone was as dark as where. 

The discovery, later in the day, that 
certain effects, such as her mother’s dress- 
ing-case and a few personal necessities 
of daily use, were gone too, seemed to 
dispose effectually of the theory of sui- 
cide ; though what remained, a lover, 
companion of her flight, being wanting ? 
It was a strange thing altogether, and the 
country was alive with wild theories and 
wild reports. But in a few days a letter 
from Mr. Dundas to the rector, and an- 
other to Edgar, set the question of self- 
destruction at rest, though also they gave 
loose to other energies of conjecture, for 
in both he said, “ No harm has come to 
her, and I am content to let her remain 
where she has elected to place herself.” 

As it was just this 'where which tor- 
mented the folk with the sense of mys- 
tery and made them eager for news, the 
father’s meagre explanation — which, in 
point of fact, was no explanation at all 
— was not found very satisfactory, and a 
few hard words were said of Mr. Dundas, 
his reserve to the world being taken for 
the same thing as indifference to his 
daughter, and resented as an offence. 
But for the third time in his life Sebas- 
tian was found capable of maintaining 
this impenetrable reserve. Pepita’s true 
status in her own country — madame’s 
suspicious debts and those damaging 
letters from London — Learn ’s hiding- 
place: he had had strength enough to 
keep his own counsel about the first two 
unbroken, and now he betrayed no more 
about this last. It may as well be said 


210 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


that for this he had sufficient reason. 
Learn, who had confessed her crime, 
and announced her intention of flight 
and of hiding herself where no one 
should find her again, had not told him 
more than these bare bones of the story. 
And he did not care to know more. The 
skeleton was horrible enough as it stood : 
he was by no means inclined to clothe it 
with the flesh of detail, still less to follow 
his erring child to her place of exile. He 
was content that she should be blotted 
out. It was the sole reparation that she 
could make. 

This sudden disappearance ended the 
foreign tour which had been Josephine’s 
sweetest anticipations of the honeymoon, 
for Mr. D Lindas turned back for home at 
once, intending to put up Ford House 
for sale and leave the place for ever. 
He was ashamed to live at North Aston, 
he said, after Team’s extraordinary con- 
duct, her shameful, shameless esclandre, 
which^ — said Josephine to her own peo- 
ple, weeping — she supposed was due to 
her, the poor little thing not liking her 
for a stepmother. 

“Though, indeed, she need not have 
been afraid,’’ said the good creature ef- 
fusively, “ for I had intended to hh kind- 
ness itself to the poor dear girl.’’ 

And when she said this, Mrs. Harrow- 
by who never failed an opportunity for 
moral cautery, remarked dryly, “In all 
probability it is as well as it is, Josephine. 
You would have been very uncomfort- 
able with her, and would have been sure 
to have spoiled her. And, as Adelaide 
Birkett always says, very sensibly, she 
is odd enough already. She need not 
be made more so.’’ 

Maria threw out a doubt as to whether 
Mr. Dundas had heard from Learn at all. 
It was not like Sebastian to be so close, 
she said ; but Josephine assured her that 
he had, and bridled a little at the vapory 
insinuation that Sebastian was not per- 
fect. She detailed the whole circum- 
stance with all the facts fully fringed and 
feathered. He had received the letter 
just as they were preparing to go to the 
Louvre, but he had not shown it to her, 
and she had not asked to see it. She 
saw, though, that he was much agitated 


when he read it, but he had put it in 
his pocket, and when she looked for it it 
was not there. All that he had said was, 
“ Learn has left home, Josephine, and we 
must go back at once.’’ Of course she 
had not asked questions, she said with a 
pleasant little assumption of wifely sub- 
mission. Her search in her husband’s 
pockets was only what might have been 
expected from the average woman, but 
the wifely submission was special. 

For this curtailment of their sister’s en- 
joyment Maria and Fanny judged Learn 
almost more severely than for any other 
delinquency involved in her flight. They 
spoke as if she had planned it purposely 
to vex her father and his bride in their 
honeymoon and deprive them of their 
lawful pleasure ; but Josephine never 
blamed her as they did, and when they 
were most bitter cast in her little words 
of soothing and excused her with more 
zeal than evidence — excused her some- 
times to the point of making her sisters 
angry with her and inclined to accuse 
her of her old failing, meek-spiritedness 
carried to the verge of self-abasement. 

But the one who suffered most of all 
those left to lament or to wonder was 
poor Alick Corfield. It was a misery to 
see him with his hollow cheeks and hag- 
gard eyes, like an animal that has been 
hunted into lone places, terrified and 
looking for a way of escape, or like a 
dog that has lost its master. He tried 
every method known to him to gain 
information of her directly or indirectly, 
but Mr. Dundas, ignorant himself, had 
only to guard that ignorance from break- 
ing out. As for knowledge, he could not 
give what he did not possess, and the 
terrible thing that he did know he was 
not likely to let appear. 

One day when the poor fellow broke 
down, as was not unusual with him when 
asking about Learn — and Mr. Dundas 
read him like a book, all save that one 
black page where the beloved name stood 
inscribed in letters of his own heart’s 
blood between the words “crime’’ and 
“murder’’ — with a woman’s liking for 
saying pleasant things which soothed 
those who heard them, and did no hurt 
to those who said them save for the in- 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


2II 


significant manner in which falsehood 
hurts the soul, Sebastian, laying his hand 
kindly on the pdor fellow’s angular shoul- 
der, said, “ I am sorry to know as much 
as I do, Alick. There is no one to v^hom 
I would have given her so readily as to 
you, my dear boy. Indeed, it was al- 
ways one of my hopes for the future, 
poor misguided child ! and I can see 
that it was yours too. Ah, how I grieve 
that it is impossible !” 

“Why impossible ?’’ asked Alick, who 
had the faculty of faith, his pale face 
flushing. 

Mr. Dundas turned white. A look 
not so much of pain as of abhorrence 
came into his face. “Impossible!” he 
said vehemently. “ I would not curse 
my greatest enemy with my daughter’s 
hand.” 

Alick felt his blood run cold. What 
did he mean ? Did he know all, or was 
he speaking only with the angry feeling 
of a man who had been disappointed and 
annoyed ? There was a short pause. 
Then said Alick, looking straight into 
Sebastian’s eyes and speaking very slow- 
ly, but with not too much emphasis, “ I 
would hold myself blessed with her as my 
wife had she even committed murder.” 

Mr. Dundas started perceptibly. “ Oh,” 
he answered after a moment’s hesitation, 
with a forced and sickly kind of smile, 
“ a silly girl’s wrong-headedness does not 
reach quite so far as that. She has done 
wrong, miserably wrong, but between 
withdrawing herself from her father’s 
house and committing such a crime as 
murder there is rather a wide difference. 
All the same, I am disgraced by her 
folly,” angrily, “and I will not let any 
one — not even you, Alick — know where 
she is.” 

“That is cruel to those who love her,” 
pleaded Alick, his eyes filling with tears. 

“If cruel it is necessary,” said Mr. 
Dundas. 

“ But she must need friends about her 
now more than she ever did,” urged 
Alick. “Tell me at least where to find 
her, that I may do what I can to console 
her.” 

Mr. Dundas shook his head. “No,” 
he said sternly. “She is dead to me. 


and shall be dead to my friends. She 
is blotted out from my love, and I will 
blot her out from my memory ; and no 
one’s persuasions can bring back what 
is effaced. Now, my dear boy, let us 
understand one another. I have sur- 
prised your secret : you love my daugh- 
ter, and had she been worthy of you I 
would have given her to you more will- 
ingly than to any one I know. But she 
herself has fixed the gulf between us, 
which I will not pass nor help any one 
else to pass. Learn to look on her as 
dead, for she is dead to me, to you, to 
the world.” 

“Never to me,” cried Alick. “While 
she lives she must be always to me what 
she has been from the first day I saw 
her. Whatever she has done, I shall 
always love her as much as I do now.” 

“You are faithful,” replied Sebastian, 
“but trust me, boy, no woman that ever 
lived was worth so much fidelity. I will 
protect you against yotir own wish, and 
be your friend in spite of yourself. You 
shall not know where she is, and you 
shall not throw yourself away on her. 
As she has elected to be effaced, she shall 
be effaced — blotted out for ever.” 

“Then I will consecrate my life to 
finding her,” cried Alick warmly. 

Mr. Dundas shrugged his shoulders. 
“Who can persuade a willful man against 
his folly ?” he said coldly. “You are fol- 
lowing a marsh-light, my boy, and if you 
do find it you will only be landed in a 
bog.” 

“ If I find her I shall have found my 
reward,” Alick answered with boyish 
fervor. “It will be happiness enough 
for me if I can bring back one smile to 
her face or lighten one hour of its sor- 
row.” 

“ Let well alone,” said Mr. Dundas ; 
but Alick answered, “Not till it is well ; 
and God will help me.” 

Whereupon the interview ended, and 
Alick left the house, feeling something 
as one of the knights of old might have 
felt when he had vowed himself to the 
quest of the Holy Grail. 

When Mr. Dundas came home, natu- 
rally the families called, as in duty bound 
and by inclination led. Excitement con- 


212 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNE AS, 


cerning Ford House was at its height, 
for there were two things to keep it alive 
— the one to see how the bride and br^e- 
groom looked, the other to try and pick 
up something definite about Learn. And 
among the rest came Mr. Gryce, with 
his floating white locks falling about his 
bland cherubic face, his mild blue eyes 
with their trick of turning red on small 
provocation, and his lisping manner of 
speech, ingenuous, interrogatory, and 
knowing nothing when interrogated in 
his turn — somehow gleaning full ears 
wherever he passed, and dropping not 
even a solitary stalk of straw in return. 
He expressed his sorrow that he had 
not seen lately his young friend. Miss 
Dundas. 

*‘In my secluded life,” he said, his 
eyelids reddening, ‘‘she is like a beau- 
tiful bird that flashes through the dull 
sky for a moment, but leaves the atmo- 
sphere brighter than before.” He glanced 
round the room as if looking for her. ” I 
hope she is well ?” he added, not attempt- 
ing to conceal a certain accent of disap- 
pointment at her absence. 

‘‘ Quite well when I heard from her,” 
answered Mr. Dundas, doing his best to 
speak without embarrassment. 

Mr. Gryce turned his face in frank as- 
tonishment on the speaker. ‘‘Ah ! She 
is from home, then ?” he asked. 

‘‘Yes,” said Mr. Dundas curtly. 

*‘I had not heard,” lisped the tenant 
of Lionnet. ‘‘But I myself have been 
from home for a few days, and have just 
returned. Though, indeed, present or 
absent, I know very little of my neigh- 
bors’ doings, as you may see. I did not 
even know that Miss Dundas was from 
home.” 

‘‘Yet it was pretty widely talked about,” 
said Mr. Dundas, with a certain suspicious 
glance at the cherubic face smiling inno- 
cently into his. 

‘‘ Doubtless the absence of Miss Dun- 
das must have caused a gap,” replied Mr. 
Gryce, ‘‘but you see, as I said, I have 
been away myself, and when I am at 
home I do not gossip.” 

‘‘Have — Where have you been?” 
asked Mr. Dundas abruptly, with that 
sudden glance as suddenly withdrawn 


which tells of a half-formed suspicion 
neither dwelt on nor clearly made out. 

‘‘To Paris,” said Mr. Gryce demurely. 
‘‘ I went to see — ” 

‘‘Oh! you went to see Notre Dame 
and La Madeleine of course,” interrupt- 
ed Sebastian satirically. 

‘‘No,” answered Mr. Gryce with a 
cherubic smile. ” Strange to say, I had 
business connected with that odd drama 
of Le Sphinx"' 

There' was not much more talk after 
this, and Mr. Gryce soon took his leave, 
desiring to be most respectfully remem- 
bered to Miss Dundas when her father 
next wrote, and to say that he was keep- 
ing some pretty specimens of moths for 
her on her return ; both of which mes- 
sages Sebastian promised to convey at 
the earliest opportunity, improvising a 
counter-remark of Team’s which he was 
sorry he could not remember accurately, 
but it was something about butterflies and 
Mr. Gryce, though what it was he could 
not positively say. 

‘‘ Never mind : I will take the will for 
the deed,” said the naturalist as he smiled 
himself through the doorway. 

And when he had gone Josephine de- 
clared that she did not care' if he never 
came again : there was something she 
did not like about him. Pushed for a 
reason by her husband, who always as- 
sumed a logical and masculine tone to 
her, she had not one to produce, but she 
stumbled as if by chance on the word 
‘‘ sinister,” which was just what Mr. Gryce 
was not. So Sebastian made her go into 
the library for the dictionary and hunt 
up the word through all its derivations, 
and thus proved to her incontestably that 
she was ignorant of the English language 
and of human nature in about equal pro- 
portions. 

It was soon remarked at the post-office 
that no letter addressed to Miss Dundas 
ever left North Aston, and that none 
came to Mr. Dundas or any one else in 
the queer, cramped handwriting which 
experience had taught Mrs. Pepper, post- 
mistress as well as the keeper of the vil- 
lage general shop, carried the sentiments 
of Learn Dundas. This caused a curious 
little buzz in the lower parts of the hive 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


213 


when Mrs, Pepper mentioned it to her 
friends and gossips ; but as no fire can 
live without fresh fuel, ^nd as nothing 
whatever was heard of Learn to stimulate 
curiosity or set new tales afloat, by de- 
grees her name dropped out of the daily 
discussions of the place, and she was no 
longer interesting, because she had be- 
come used up and talked out. 

Only, Mr. Gryce wrote more frequently 
than had been his wont to Miss Gryce at 
Windy Brow in Cumberland— conjectured 
to be his sister ; and only, Alick never 
ceased in his attempts to discover where 
his lost queen was hidden, though these 
attempts had hitherto been hopelessly 
baffled, partly because he had not an 
inch of foothold whence to make his 
first spring, nor the thinnest clew to tell 
him which path to take. 

And as a purchaser, the final cause of 
whose existence seemed to have been the 
unquestioning possession of Ford House, 
came suddenly on the scene and took 
the whole thing as it stood, Sebastian 
and his wife left the place, taking Fina 
with them, and migrated to Paris to fin- 
ish their interrupted honeymoon. So now 
it was supposed that the last link connect- 
ing Learn with North Aston was broken, 
and that she was indeed blotted out and 
for ever. 

True love is faithful, and Alick Cor- 
field’s love was true. Had all the world 
forsaken her, he would have remained 
immovable in his old place and attitude 
of devotion — the one fixed idea always 
possessing him to find her in her retreat 
and restore her to self-respect and hap- 
piness by his undying love. But how to 
find her ? All sorts of mad projects pass- 
ed through his brain, but mad projects 
need some methods, and methods in har- 
mony with existing conditions, if they are 
to bring success ; and Alick’s vague re- 
solves to go out and look for her had no 
more meaning in them than the random 
moves of a bad chessplayer. 

Had Sir Lancelot lived at the present 
time, he would have gone to Camelot by 
express, like meaner souls ; and had Sir 
Galahad set out on his quest in the latter 
half of the nineteenth century, he would 
have either advertised in the newspapers 


or have employed a detective for the first 
part of his undertaking. So, had Alick 
gone to Scotland Yard and taken the 
police into his confidence. Learn would 
have been found in less than a week ; 
but as he shrank from bringing her intp 
contact with the force mainly associated 
with crime, he was left to his own devices 
unassisted, and these devices ended only 
in constantly - recurring disappointment, 
and consequent increase of sorrow. 

His sorrow indeed was so great, and 
told on him so heavily, that every one 
said he was going to die. He had been 
left thin and gaunt enough by his illness, 
but distress of mind, coupled with weak- 
ness of body, reduced him to a kind of 
sketchy likeness of Don Quixote-— his 
pure soul and honest nature the only 
beautiful things about him — while his 
mother’s heart was as nearly bro-ken as 
his own. 


CHAPTER XXXIX. 

WINDY BROW. 

While North Aston was employing its 
time in wondering, and Alick Corfield was 
breaking his heart in sorrowing. Learn 
was doing battle with her despair and 
distress at Windy Brow— doing the best 
she could to keep her senses clear and 
to live through the penance which she 
had inflicted on herself. 

So far, Mrs. Pepper’s conclusions, 
based on a badly -gummed envelope, 
were right : Miss Gryce of Windy Brow 
was the sister of Mr. Gryce of Lionnet, 
though even Mrs. Pepper did not know 
that Learn Dundas, under the name of 
Leonora Darley, was living with her. 

It is not the most obvious agents that 
are the most influential. The greatest 
tilings in Nature are the work of the 
smallest creatures, and our lives are 
manipulated far more by unseen influ- 
ences, known only to ourselves, than by 
those patent to the world. In all North 
Aston, Mr. Gryce was the man who had 
apparently the least hold on the place 
and the slightest connection with the 
p>eople. He had come there by acci- 
dent, and by choice lived in retirement, 


214 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


though also by choice he had not been 
there a month before he knew all there 
was to be known of every individual for 
miles round. The merest chances had 
made him personally acquainted with 
Sebastian Dundas — those chances his 
tenancy of Lionnet and the slight attack 
of fever which called forth his landlord’s 
sentiment and pity. Through the father 
he came to know the daughter, when the 
prying curiosity of his nature, his liking 
for seci et influence and concealed action, 
together with the kind heart at bottom, 
and his real affection for the girl whose 
confidence he had partly forced and 
partly won, threw the whole secret into 
his hands and made him master of the 
situation — the keeper of the seal set 
against the writings whom no one sus- 
pected of complicity. This was exactly 
the kind of thing he liked, and the kind 
of thing that suited him, human mole, 
born detective and conspirator as he 
was. 

When Learn met him in the wood on 
the evening of her confession to Edgar, 
she met him with the deliberate inten- 
tion of confessing her fearful secret to 
him too, and of asking him to help her 
to escape, like the friend which he had 
promised he would be. She knew that 
it was impossible for her now to live at 
North Aston, and the sole desire she had 
was to be blotted out, as she had been. 

There was no excitement about her, 
no feverish exaltation that would burn 
itself cold before twenty-four hours were 
over — only the dead dreariness of heart- 
break, the tenacious resolution of despair. 
She neither wept nor wrung her hands, 
but quiet, pale, rigid, she told her terrible 
story in the low and level tones in which 
a Greek Fate might have spoken, as sad 
and as immutable. She had sinned, and 
now had made such atonement as she 
could by confession — to her lover to save 
him from pollution, to her father to can- 
cel his obligations to her, to her friend 
to be helped in her lifelong penance. 
This done, she had strengthened herself 
to bear all that might come to her with 
that resignation of remorse which de- 
mands no rights and inherits no joys. 
She was not one of those emotional half- 


hearted creatures who resolve one day, 
break down the next, and drift always. 
For good and e^^il alike she had the pow- 
er to hold where she had gripped and to 
maintain what she had undertaken ; and 
even her life at Windy Brow did not shake 
her. 

And that life might well have shaken 
both a stronger mind and even a more 
resolute will than hers. 

A square stone house of eight rooms, 
set on a bleak , fell-side where the sun 
never shone, where no fruits ripened, no 
flowers bloomed and no trees grew, save 
here and there a dwarfed and twisted 
thorn covered with pale gray lichen and 
bent by the wind into painful deformity 
of growth — a house which had no gar- 
den, only a strip of rank, coarse grass 
before the windows, with a potato-patch 
and kail-yard to the side ; where was no 
adornment within or without, no beau- 
ty of color, no softness of line, merely a 
rugged, lonesome, square stone tent set 
up on a mountain-spur, as it would seem 
for the express reception of tortured pen- 
itents not seeking to soften sorrow, — this 
was Windy Brow, the patrimony of the 
Gryces, where Keziah, Emmanuel’s eld- 
est sister, lived and had lived these sixty 
years and more. 

The house stood alone. Monk Grange, 
the hamlet to which it geographically be- 
longed — a place as bleak and bare as 
itself, and which seemed to have been 
flung against the fell-foot as if a brick- 
layer’s hodman had pitched the hovels 
at haphazard anyhow — was two good 
miles away, and the market-town, to be 
got at only by crossing a dangerous moor, 
was nine miles off — as far as Sherrington 
from North Aston. 

The few poor dwellers in Monk Grange 
had little to do with the market-town. 
They lived mostly on what they man- 
aged to raise and rear among themselves 
— holding braxy mutton good enough for 
feast-days, and oatmeal porridge all the 
year round the finest food for men and 
bairns alike. As for the gudewives’ 
household necessaries, they were got by 
the carrier who passed once a fortnight 
on their road ; and for the rest, if aught 
was wanting more than that which they 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


215 


had, they did without, and, according to 
the local saying, “want was t’ master.” 

Society of a cultured kind there was 
none. The clergyman was an old man 
little if it all superior to the flock to which 
he ministered. He was a St. Bees man, 
the son of a handloom weaver, speaking 
broad Cumberland and hopelessly “ dish- 
ed” by a hard word in the Bible. He 
was fond of his glass, and was to be 
found every day of his life from three to 
nine at the Blucher, smoking a clay pipe 
and drinking rum and milk. He had 
never married, but he was by no means 
an ascetic in his morals, as more than 
one buxom wench in his parish had 
proved ; and in all respects he was an 
anachronism, the like of which is rare 
now among the fells and dales, though 
at one time it was the normal type for 
the clergy of the remoter North Country 
districts. 

This old sinner — Priest Wilson as he 
was called — and Miss Gryce of Windy 
Brow represented the wealth and in- 
tellect of a place which was at the back 
of everything, out of the highway of life 
and untouched by the progress of history 
or science. And the one was not very 
much superior to the other save in moral 
cleanliness ; which, however, counts for 
something. 

If North Aston had said with a sniff 
that Mr. Gryce was not thoroughbred, 
what would have been its verdict on Sister 
Keziah ? H e at least had rubbed off some 
of the native fell-side mould by rolling 
about foreign parts, gathering experience 
if not moss, and becoming rich in know- 
ledge if not in guineas ; but Keziah, who 
had spent the last twenty years of her 
life in close attendance on a paralytic old 
mother, had stiffened as she stood, and 
the local mould encrusting her was very 
thick. Nevertheless, she too had a good 
heart if a rough hand, and, though ec- 
centric almost to insanity, as one so often 
finds with people living out of the line 
and influence of public opinion, yet was 
as sound at the core as she was rude and 
odd in the husk. 

She was a small woman, lean, wrink- 
led, and with a curious mixture of prim- 
ness and slovenliness in her dress. She 


wore a false front, which she called a 
topknot, the small, crimped, deep-brown 
mohair curls of which were bound about 
her forehead with a bit of black velvet 
ribbon, while gray hairs straggled from 
underneath to make the patent sham 
more transparent still ; and over her top- 
knot she wore a rusty black cap that en- 
closed the keen m/onkeyish face like a 
ruff. Her every-day gown was one of 
coarse brown camlet, any number of 
years old, darned and patched till it was 
like a Joseph’s coat ; and the Rob Roy 
tartan shawl which she pinned across her 
bosom hid a state of dilapidation which 
even she did not care should be seen. 
She wore a black stuff apron full of fine 
tones from fruit-stains and fire-scorch- 
ings ; and she took snuff. 

She was reputed to be worth a mort 
of money, and she had saved a goodly 
sum. It would have been more had she 
had the courage to invest it ; but she had 
a profound distrust of all financial spec- 
ulations — had not Emmanuel lost his 
share by playing at knucklebones with 
it in the City ? — and she was not the fool 
to follow my leader into the mire. For 
her part, she put her trust in teapots and 
stockings, with richer hoards wrapped in 
rags and sewn up in the mattress, and 
here a few odd pounds under the rice 
and there a few hidden in the coffee. 
That was her idea of a banking account, 
and she held it to be the best there was. 

“Don’t lend your hat,” she used to 
say, “and then you’ll not have to go 
bareheaded.” And sometimes, talking 
of loans on securities, she would take a 
pinch of snuff and say she “reckoned 
nowt of that man who locked his own 
granary door and gave another man the 
key.” 

To all appearance, she lived only to 
scrape and hoard, moidering away her 
loveless life on the futile energies and 
sordid aims of a miser’s wretched pleas- 
ures. But every now and then she had 
risen up out of the slough into which she 
had gradually sunk, and had done some 
grand things that marked her name with 
so many white stones. While she glo- 
ried in her skill in filching from the pig 
what would serve the chickens, in mak- 


2i6 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


ing Jenny go short to save to-day’s bak- 
ing of havre- bread, in skimping Tim’s 
b^wl of porridge — his appetite being a 
burden on her estate which she often de- 
clared would break her — she had more 
than once given a hundred pounds at a 
blow to build a raft for a poor drowning 
wretch who must otherwise have sunk. 
In fact, she was one of those people who 
are small with the small things of life 
and great with the great — who will grudge 
a daily dole of a few threshed-out stalks 
of straw, but who sometimes, when right- 
ly touched, will shower down with both 
hands full sheaves of golden grain. That 
is, she had mean aims, a bad temper, no 
imagination, but the capacity for pity 
and generosity on occasions. 

Above all things, she hated to be put 
out of the way or intruded on. When 
her brother Emmanuel came down on 
her without a word of warning, bringing 
a girl with eyes that, as she said, made 
her feel foolish to look at, and a manner 
part scared, part stony, and wholly un- 
conformable, telling her to keep this pre- 
cious-bit madam like a bale of goods till 
called for, and to do the best with it 
she could, she was justified, she said, 
in splurging against his thoughtless- 
ness and want of consideration, taking 
a body like that all of a heap, without 
With your leave or By your leave, or 
giving one a chance of saying Yes I 
will, or No I won’t. 

But though she splurged she gave way ; 
and after she had fumed and fussed, 
heckled the maid and harried the man, 
said she didn’t see as how she could, and 
she didn’t think as how she would, sworn 
there was no bedding fit to use, and that 
she had no place for the things — apples 
and onions chiefly — that were in the spare 
room if she gave it up for the young lass’s 
use, she seemed to quiet down, and going 
over to Learn, standing mutely by the 
black-boarded fireplace, put on her spec- 
tacles, peered up into her face, and said 
in shrill tones, rasping as a saw, though 
she meant to be kind, “Ah, well ! I sup- 
pose it must be so go your ways up stairs 
with Jenny, bairn, and make yourself at 
home. It’s little I have for a fine young 
miss like you to play with, but what I 


have you’re welcome to ; so make no 
bones about it: d’ye hear?” 

“ But I am in your way,” said Learn, 
not moving. “You do not want me ?’’ 

Miss Gryce laughed. “Want ye?’’ she 
shouted. “Want ye, do you say ? Nay, 
nay, honey, it was no wanting of you or 
your marras that would ever have given 
me a headache. I’ll ensure ye. But now 
that you are here you can bide as long 
as you’ve a mind ; and you’re welcome 
kindly. And Emmanuel there knows 
that my word is as good as my bond, 
and what I say I mean.’’ 

“Am I to stay?’’ asked Learn, turning 
to Mr. Gryce with a certain forced hu- 
mility which showed how much it cost 
her to submit. 

“Yes,’’ he answered, less cheerfully 
and more authoritatively than was his 
manner at North Aston, speaking with- 
out a lisp and with a full Cumberland 
accent. “ It is the best thing I can do 
for you — all I have to offer.’’ 

To which Learn bent her sad head 
with pathetic patience — pathetic indeed 
to those who knew the proud spirit that 
it reported broken and humbled for ever. 
Following the red -armed, touzled, rag- 
ged maid to the dingy cabin that was to 
be her room, she left her friend to ex- 
plain to his sister, so far as he chose and 
could, the necessity under which he 
found himself of leaving his adopted 
daughter, Leonora Darley, in her care 
for a week or two, until such time as he 
should return and claim her. 

“Your adopted daughter? God bless 
my soul, man ! but you are the daftest don- 
net I ever saw on two legs !’’ cried Keziah, 
snatching up the coarse gray knitting 
which was the sole unanchored circum- 
stance in the room and casting off her 
heel viciously. “What call had you to 
adopt a daughter — you with never a wife 
to mother her nor a house of your own 
to take her to? For I reckon nowt of 
your furnished houses here and your 
beggarly apartments there, as you know. 
And now you can do nothing better than 
bring her here to fash the life out of me 
before the week’s over! But that’s al- 
ways the way with you men. You talk 
precious big, but it’s mighty little you put 





THE A TONEME NT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


217 


your hands to ; and when you hack out 
yokes for which you get a deal of praise, 
you take care not to bear them on your 
own backs. It’s us women who have to 
do that.” 

“One would have supposed you would 
have liked a pretty young thing like that 
in the house. You are lonesome enough 
here, and it makes a little life,” said Em- 
manuel quietly. 

He knew his sister Keziah, and that 
she must have her head when the talk- 
ing fit was on her. 

‘“A pretty young thing like that!’” 
she repeated scornfully. “ Lord love you, 
born cuddy as you are ! What’s her 
good looks to me, I wonder, but a pound 
spent on a looking-glass, and Jenny taken 
off her work to make cakes and butter- 
sops for her dainty teeth ? We’ll have 
all the men-folk too havering round to 
see which of ’em may have the honor of 
ruining himself for my fine lady. And 
I’ll not have it, I tell ye. I’ll not have 
my house turned into a fair, with madam 
there as the show. Life ! what do I want 
with ‘ life ’ about me, or you either, Em- 
manuel? I’ve got my right foot in the 
grave, and I reckon yours is not far off ; 
and what we’ve both got to do now is to 
see that we make a good ending for our 
souls.” 

“At all events, you don’t refuse to 
take her for a week or two ?” asked Em- 
manuel innocently. 

“ Did I say I refused ? Did I send her 
up stairs as the nigh^st road to the street- 
door?” retorted his sister with disdain. 

“ Did I not tell you, as plain as tongue 
could speak, that she is welcome to her 
bit and sup, and I’ll pass the time away 
for her in the best way I can, though bad 
is the best, I reckon?” 

“Well, well, you are a good body,” 
said her brother. 

“Ay,” she answered, “I am good' 
enough when I jump your way. But tell 
me, Emmanuel,” changing from the dis- 
dain of the superior creature holding forth 
on high matters to the inferior to the fa- 
miliar gossip of the natural woman, 
“what’s to do with her?. It’s as* plain as 
a pike-staff that something is troubling 
her, and maybe it will be some of your | 


love nonsense? for it’s mainly that as 
fashes the lasses. Good Lord ! I’m thank- 
ful I was never hindered that way.” 

“Yes,” said Mr. Gryce, “she has had 
what you women call a disappointment ; 
and,” speaking with unusual energy, “the 
man was a fool and a coward, and she 
has had a lucky escape.” 

“Say ye ? If so, then there is no call 
for her to carry on,” said Keziah philo- 
sophically. “ But the poor bairn’s look- 
ing wantle enough now, though I war- 
rant me the fell-side air will brisk her up 
in no time.” 

“ I hope it will,” said her brother. 

“What does she eat, now? You see, 
now I’ve got the lass on my hands, I 
cannot hunger her,” said Keziah. “Not 
that I can give her dainties and messes,” 
she added hastily, the miser’s cloak 
suddenly covering the woman’s heart. 
“She’ll have to take what we get, and 
be thankful for her meat. Still, it’s as 
well to know what a body’s been accus- 
tomed to when they come like this, all 
of a heap.” 

“Don’t fash yourself about her,” an- 
swered Emmanuel. “ Do what you can 
— that you will, I know — but leave her to 
herself : that’s the way for her. She’s 
an odd little body, and the least said the 
soonest mended with Learn.” 

“With who, d’ye say ?” asked Keziah 
sharply. 

“Lean — Leonora,” said Emmanuel 
cherubically. 

“Well, I wouldn’t call a daughter of 
mine after old Pharaoh’s kine,” snapped 
Keziah with supreme scorn ; and at, that 
moment Learn came into the room, and 
Keziah bustled out of it to tig after Jen- 
ny and ding at Tim, as these two faith- 
ful servitors were wont to express the 
way of their mistress toward them. 

“ My dear, I did not know that things 
were so miserable here for you, but you 
must just bide here till the scent grows 
cold, and then I’ll come for you and put 
you where you’ll be better off,” said Mr. 
Gryce kindly when he was alone with 
Learn. 

“This will do,” said Learn, suppress- 
ing a shudder as she looked round the 
little room, where what had originally 


2i8 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS. 


been a rhubarb-colored paper — chosen 
because it was a good wearing color — 
was patched here and there with scraps 
of newspapers or bits of other patterned 
papers ; where the huge family Bible 
and a few musty and torn odd volumes 
of the Spectator and the Tatler com- 
prised the sole library ; and where the 
only ornaments on the chimneypiece 
were three or four bits of lead ore from 
the Roughton Gill mines, above Cald- 
beck. 

“You have been used to something far 
different,” said Emmanuel, compassion- 
ately. 

“ My past is over,” she answered in a 
low voice. 

“ But you’ll come to a better future,” 
he cried, his mild blue eyes watery and 
red. 

“ Shall I ? When I die ?” was her re- 
ply as she passed her hand wearily over 
her forehead, and wished^ah, how ar- 
dently ! — that the question might answer 
itself now at once. 

But the young live against their will, 
and Learn, though bruised and broken, 
had still the grand vitality of youth to 
support her. Of the stuff of which in a 
good cause martyrs, in a bad criminals, 
are made, she accepted her position at 
Windy Brow with the very heroism of 
resignation. She never complained, 
though every circumstance, every con- 
dition, was simply torture ; and so soon 
as she saw what she was expected to do, 
she did it without remonstrance or reluc- 
tance. Her life there was like a lesson 
in a foreign language which she had un- 
dertaken to learn by heart, and she gave 
herself to her task loyally. But it was 
suffering beyond even. what Emmanuel 
Gryce supposed or Keziah ever dreamed 
of. She, with the sun of the South in 
her veins, her dreams of pomegranates 
and orange-groves, of music and color 
and bright blue skies, of women as beau- 
tiful as mamma, of that one man — not 
of the South, but fit to have been the 
godlike son of Spain — suddenly trans- 
lated from soft and leafy North Aston to 
a bleak fell-side in the most desolate 
corner of Cumberland — where for lush 
hedges were cold, grim gray stone walls. 


and the sole flowers to be seen gorse 
which she could not gather, and heather 
which had no perfume — to a house set so 
far under the shadow that it saw the sun 
only for three months in the year, and 
where her sole companion was old Ke- 
ziah Gryce, ill-favored in person, rough 
of mood if true of soul, or creatures even 
worse than herself ; — she, with that te- 
nacious loyalty, that pride and concen- 
trated passion, that dry reserve and want 
of general benevolence characteristic of 
her, to be suddenly cast among uncouth 
strangers whose ways she must adopt, 
and who were physically loathsome to 
her ; dead to the only man she loved, his 
love for her killed by her own hand, her- 
self by her own confession accursed ; 
and to bear it all in silent patience, — was 
it not heroic ? Had she been more plas- 
tic than she was, the effort would not 
have been so great. Being what she 
was, it was grand ; and made as it was 
for penitence, it had in it the essential 
spirit of saintliness. For saintliness 
comes in small things as well as great, 
and George Herbert’s swept room is a 
true image. There was saintliness in 
the docility with which she rose at six 
and went to bed at nine ; saintliness in 
the quiet asceticism with which she ate 
porridge for breakfast and porridge for 
supper — at the first honestly believing it 
either a joke or an insult, and that they 
had given her pigs’ food to try her tem- 
per ; saintliness in the silence with which 
she accepted her dinners, maybe a piece 
of fried bacon and potatoes, or a huge 
mess of apple-pudding on washing-days, 
or a plate of poached eggs cooked in a 
pan not over clean ; saintliness in the 
enforced attention which she gave to Ke- 
ziah’s rambling stories of her pigs and her 
chickens, her mother’s ailments, Jenny’s 
shortcomings in the matter of sweepings 
and savings, Tim’s wastefulness in the 
garden over the kailrunts, and the hard- 
ships of life on a lone woman left with 
only a huzzy to look after her ; saintli- 
ness in the repression of that proud, fas- 
tidious self to which Keziah’s familiarity 
and snuff, Jenny’s familiarity and disor- 
der, the smell of the peat — which was the 
only fuel they burnt — reeking through the 


THE ATOWEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


219 


house, and the utter ugliness and bar- 
ren discomfort of everything about, were 
hourly miseries which she would once 
have repudiated with her most cutting 
scorn ; saintliness in the repression of 
that self indeed at all four corners, and 
the resolute submission to her burden 
because it was her fitting punishment. 

So the sad days wore on, and the fell- 
side air had not yet brisked up Emman- 
uel’s adopted daughter as his sister proph- 
esied. Indeed, she seemed slighter and 
paler than ever, and if possible more 
submissive to her lot and more taciturn. 
And as her intense quietude of bearing 
suited Miss Gryce, who could not bear 
to be fussed, and time proved her douce 
and not fashions, she became quite a 
favorite with her rough-grained hostess, 
who wondered more and more where 
Emmanuel had picked her up, and whose 
bairn she really was. 

Her only pleasure was in wandering 
over the fells, whence she could see the 
tops of the Derwentwater mountains, and 
from some points a glimpse of blue Bas- 
santhwaite flowing out into the open ; 
where mountain-tarns, lying like silver 
plates in the purple distance, were her 
magic shows, seen only in certain lights, 
and more often lost than found ; whence 
she could look over the broad Carlisle 
plain and dream of that day on the North 
Aston moor when she first met Edgar 
Harrowby ; and whence the glittering 
strip of the Solway against the horizon 
made her yearn to be in one of the ships 
which she could dimly discern passing 
up and down, so that she might leave 
England for ever and lay down the bur- 
den of her life and her sorrow in mam- 
ma’s dear land. 

So the hours passed, dreary as Mari- 
ana’s, and hopeless as those wherein we 
stand round the^rave and know that the 
end of all things has come. And while 
North Aston wondered, and Alick mourn- 
ed, and Edgar repented of his past folly 
with his handsome head in Adelaide’s 
lap. Learn Dundas moved slowly through 
the shadow to the light, and from her 
chastisement gathered that sweet grace 
of patience which redeemed her soul 
and raised her from sin to sanctity. 


CHAPTER XL. 

LOST AND NOW FOUND. 

In bringing up Alick tied tight to her 
apron-strings, feeding him on moral pap, 
putting his mind into petticoats, and seek- 
ing to make him more of a woman than 
a man, Mrs. Corfield had defeated her 
design and destroyed her own influence. 
During his early growth the boy had 
yielded to her without revolt, because he 
was more modest than self-assertive — 
had no solid point of resistance and no 
definite purpose for which to resist ; but 
after his college career he developed 
on an independent line, and his soul es- 
caped altogether from his mother’s hold. 
Had she let him ripen into manhood in 
the freedom of natural development, she 
would have been his chosen friend and 
confidante to the end : having invaded 
the most secret chambers of his mind, 
and sought to mould every thought ac- 
cording to the pattern which she held 
best, when the reaction set in the pen- 
dulum swung back in proportion to its 
first beat; and as a protest against his 
former thraldom he now made her a 
stranger to his inner life and shut her 
out inexorably from the holy place of 
his sorrow. 

The mother felt her son’s mind slip- 
ping from her, but what could she do ? 
Who can set time backward or reanimate 
the dead ? Day by day found him more 
silent and more suffering, the poor little 
woman nearly as miserable as himself. 
But the name of Learn, standing as the 
spectre between them, was never men- 
tioned after Mrs. Corfield’s first outburst 
of indignation at her flight — indignation 
not because she was really angry with 
Learn, but because Alick was unhappy. 

After Alick’s stern rejoinder, “ Mother, 
the next time you speak ill of Learn Dun- 
das I will leave your house for ever,” the 
subject dropped by mutual consent, but 
it was none the less a living barrier be- 
tween them because raised and main- 
tained in silence. 

” Oh, these girls ! these wicked girls !” 
Mrs. Corfield had said with a mother’s 
irrational anger when speaking of the 
circumstance to her husband. ‘‘We 
bring up our boys only for them to take 


220 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


from us. As soon as they begin to be 
some kind of comfort and to repay the 
anxiety of their early days, then a wretch- 
ed little huzzy steps in and makes one’s 
life in vain.” 

‘‘Just so, my dear,” said Dr. Corfield 
quietly. ‘‘ These were the identical words 
which my mother said to me when I told 
her I was going to marry you.” 

‘‘Your mother never liked me, and I 
did like Learn,” said Mrs. Corfield tartly. 

‘‘ As Learn Dundas, maybe ; but as 
Learn the wife of your son, I doubt it.” 

‘‘If Alick had liked it — ” said Mrs. Cor- 
field, half in tears. 

‘‘You would have been jealous,” re- 
turned her husband. ‘‘ No : all girls are 
only daughters of Heth to the mothers 
of Jacobs, and I never knew one whom 
a mother thought good enough for her 
boy.” 

‘‘ You need not discredit your own flesh 
and blood for a stranger,” cried Mrs. 
Corfield crossly ; and the mute man with 
an aggravating smile suddenly seemed 
to repent of his unusual loquacity, and 
gradually subsided into himself and his 
calculations, from which he was so rare- 
ly aroused. 

Alick, ceasing to make a confidante 
of his mother, began to make a friend 
of Mr. Gryce. Perhaps it ought rather 
to be said that Mr. Gryce began to make 
a friend of him. The old philosopher, 
with that corkscrew mind of his, knew 
well enough what was amiss with the 
poor lank-visaged curate. Being of the 
order of the benevolent busybodies fond 
of playing Providence, how mole-like so- 
ever his method, he had marked out a 
little plan of his own by which he thought 
he could make all the crooked roads run 
straight and discord flow into harmony. 
But he too fell into the mistake common 
to busybodies, benevolent and otherwise 
— treating souls as if they were machines 
to be wound up and kept going by the 
clockwork of an extraneous will and neat- 
ly manipulated by well-arranged circum- 
stance. 

One day he joined Alick in his walk 
to an outlying cottage of the parish, 
where the husband was sick and the 
wife and children short of food, and the 


Church sent its prayer-book and minis- 
ters as the best substitute it knew' for a 
wholesome dwelling and sufficient wages. 
Theology was not much in the way of 
an old heathen who reduced all religions 
save Mohammedanism to the transmuted 
presentation of the archaic solar myth, 
and who thought Buddhism far ahead 
of every other creed; but he liked the 
man Alick, if the parson bored him, and 
he w^as caressing a plan which he had in 
his pocket. 

‘‘You find your life here satisfying, I 
suppose?” he began, his blue eyes look- 
ing into the wayside banks for creatures. 

‘‘ Is any life ?” answered Alick, his eyes 
turned to the vague distance. 

‘‘Not fully : the spirit of progress, work- 
ing by discontent, forbids the social stag- 
nation of rest and thankfulness ; but we 
can come to something that suffices for 
our daijy wants if it does not satisfy all 
our longings. Work in harmony with 
our nature, and doing good here and 
there when we can, both these help us 
on. But the work must be harmonious 
and the good we do manifest.” 

‘‘ So far as that goes, Church-work is 
pleasant to me — all, indeed, I care for 
or am fit for ; but North Aston is stony 
ground,” said Alick. 

‘‘Can you wonder? When the hus- 
bandman-in-chief is such a man as Mr. 
Birkett, you must make your account 
with stones and weeds. The spiritual 
cannot flourish under the hand of the 
unspiritual ; and, considering the pastor, 
the flock is far from bad.” 

‘‘ That may be, but w'e do not like to 
live only in comparatives,” said Alick. 
‘‘ I confess I should be happier in a cure 
where I was more of one mind with my 
rector than I am here, and not decried 
or ridiculed on account of every scheme 
for good that I might propose. Parish- 
work here is shamefully neglected, but 
Mr. Birkett will not let me do anything 
to mend it.” 

‘‘Ah!” said Mr. Gryce, catching a 
luckless curculio by the way, ‘‘that is 
bad. A more harmonious one would 
certainly be, as you say, far more agree- 
able. Or a little parish of your own — a 
parish, however small, which would be 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNE AS. 


221 


! all your own, and you not under the con- 
1 trol of any one below your diocesan ? 
I How would that do ? That would be my 
affair if I were in the Church.” 

Alick’s face lightened. ‘‘ Yes,” he said, 
” that is my dream — at least one of them. 
I would not care how small the ^lace 
might be, if I had supreme control and 
might work unhindered in my own way.” 

‘‘It will come,” said Mr. Gryce cheer- 
ily. ‘‘All things come in time to him 
who knows how to wait.” 

‘‘Ah, if I could believe that!” sighed 
Alick, thinking of Learn. 

‘‘Take my word for it,” returned Mr. 
Gryce. ‘‘ It will do you no harm to have 
a dash of rose-color in your rather' som- 
bre life; and Hope, if it tells flatter- 
ing tales, does not always tell untrue 
ones.” 

‘‘ I fear my hope has flattered me un- 
truly,” said Alick, his faithful heart still 
on Learn. 

Mr. Gryce captured a caterpillar wan- 
dering across the road. ‘‘ Conduct is fate,” 
he said. ‘‘ If this poor fellow had not been 
troubled with a fit of restlessness, but had 
been content to lie safely hidden among 
the grass-roots where he was born, he 
would not have been caught. Yes, con- 
duct is fate for a captive caterpillar as 
well as for man.” 

‘‘And yet who can foresee ?” said Alick. 
‘‘We all walk in the dark blindfold.” 

‘‘As you say, who can foresee? That 
makes perhaps the hardship of it, but it 
does not alter the fact. Blindly walking 
or with our eyes wide open, our steps 
determine our destiny, and our goal is 
reached by our own endeavors. We 
ourselves are the artificers of our lives, 
and mould them according to our own 
pattern.” 

‘‘But that part of our lives which is 
under the influence of another ? How 
can we manipulate that?” said Alick. 
‘‘Love and loss are twin powers which 
create or crush without our co-operation.” 

‘‘ I only know one irreparable manner 
of loss — that by death,” said Mr. Gryce 
steadfastly. ‘‘ For all others while there 
is life there is hope, and I hold nothing 
beyond the power of the will to remedy.” 

‘‘I wish I could believe that,” Alick 


sighed again ; and again Mr. Gryce said 
cheerily, ‘‘ Then take that too on trust, 
and believe me if you do not believe in 
your own inborn elasticity, your own pow- 
er of doing and undoing.” 

‘‘There are some things which can 
never come right when they have once 
gone wrong,” said Alick. 

‘‘You think so? I know very few,” 
his companion answered in the hearty, 
inspiriting manner which he had used 
all through the interview, talking with a 
broader accent and lisping less than usu- 
al, looking altogether more manly and 
less cherubic than his wont. ‘‘I am a 
believer myself in the power of the will 
and holding on.” After a pause he add- 
ed suddenly, ‘‘You would be really glad 
of a small living, no matter where situ- 
ated, nor how desolate and unimportant, 
where you would be sole master ?” 

‘‘Yes,” said Alick. ‘‘If I could win 
over one soul to the higher life, I should 
count myself repaid for all my exertions. 
We must all have our small beginnings.” 

‘‘ I am an odd old fellow, as you know, 
Mr. Corfield,” laughed Emmanuel Gryce. 
‘‘Give me your hand: I can sometimes 
see a good deal of the future in the hand.” 

Alick blushed and looked awkward, 
but he gave his bony, ill-shaped hand all 
the same. 

After a little while, during which Mr. 
Gryce had bent this finger this way and 
that finger another way, had counted the 
lines made by the bended wrist, and had 
talked half to himself of the line of Ju- 
piter and the line of Saturn, the line of 
life and that of Venus, he said quietly, 
‘‘You will have your wish, and soon. I 
see a most important change of residence 
at about this time, which in conjunction 
with this,” pointing to a small cross at 
the root of the fourth finger, ‘‘will be 
certainly to your advantage.” 

‘‘How strange!” said Alick. ‘‘One 
scarcely knows whether to laugh at it all 
as old wives’ fables or to believe in the 
mysterious forewarnings of fate, the fore- 
markings of the future.” 

‘‘ There are more things in heaven and 
earth — ’ ’ said Mr. Gryce. ‘‘And we know 
so little we may well believe a trifle more.” 

The fact was, all this was founded on 


222 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


these circumstances : He had at this mo- 
ment a letter in his pocket from his sister 
Keziah telling him that old Priest Wilson 
had been found dead in his bed last night ; 
the bishop’s chaplain was a friend of his, 
both having been at the same station in 
India ; and the perpetual curacy of Monk 
Grange was one which, if offices went ac- 
cording to their ratio of unpleasantness, 
a man should have been paid a large in- 
come to take. Hence there was no chance 
of a rush for the preferment, and the bish- 
op would be grateful for any intimation 
of a willing martyr. Through all of 
which chinks whereby to discover the 
future Mr. Gryce founded his prophecy ; 
and through them, too, it came about 
that he proved a true prophet. In three 
days’ time from this the post brought a 
letter to Alick Corfield from the bishop 
offering him the perpetual curacy of 
Monk Grange, income seventy pounds 
a year and a house. 

Before speaking even to his mother, 
Alick rushed off with this letter to Mr. 
Gryce. The old leaven of superstition 
which works more or less in all of us — 
even those few who think proof a desi- 
rable basis for belief, and who require 
an examination conducted on scientific 
principles before they accept supernatu- 
ralism as “ only another law coming in to 
modify those already known ” — that su- 
perstition which belongs to most men, and 
to Alick with the rest, made this letter a 
matter of tremendous excitement to him. 
He saw in it the hand of God and the 
finger of Fate. It was impossible that 
Mr. Gryce, living at North Aston, should 
know anything of a small country in- 
cumbency in the North. It was all that 
study made of his poor parched and 
knuckly hand. And what had been 
seen there was manifestly the thing 
ruled for him by Providence and destiny. 

“How could you possibly tell?’’ he 
cried, looking at his own hand as if he 
could read it as his clever friend had 
done. 

“That is my secret,’’ said Emmanuel, 
smiling at the credulity on which he 
traded. Then, thinking a flutter out- 
ward of the corners of his cards the best 
policy in the circumstances about them 


at the moment, he added, “And when 
you get there you will understand more 
than you do now. For you will go ?’’ 

“Surely,’’ said Alick: “it would be 
unfaithful in me to refuse.’’ 

“ But see if you cannot make arrange- 
ments to take the place on trial for a few 
months. I know very little of your ec- 
clesiastical law, but grant even that it is as 
devoid of common sense as I should sup- 
pose — seeing who are the men who make, 
administer and obey it — still, I should 
think that a temporary incumbency might 
be arranged.’’ 

“I should think so, and I will take 
your advice,’’ said Alick, over whom Em- 
manuel Gryce was fast establishing the 
power which belongs to the stronger over 
the weaker, to the more astute over the 
more dense. 

“You will find an adopted daughter 
of mine in the neighborhood,’’ then said 
Mr. Gryce with the most amiable indif- 
ference. “She lives with my sister at 
our old home on the fell-side : Windy 
Brow the place is called. You must tell 
me how she looks and what you think 
of her altogether when you write to me, 
as I suppose you will do, or when you 
come home, if you elect not to take the 
cure even on trial.’’ 

“ I am not much in the way of criticis- 
ing young ladies,’’ said Alick sadly. 

“She is rather a remarkable girl, all 
things considered,’’ returned Mr. Gryce 
quietly. “ Her name is Leonora Darley. 
You will remember — Leonora Darley. 
Ask for her when you go up to Windy 
Brow: Leonora Darley,’’ for the third 
time. 

“All right : Miss Leonora Darley,’’ re- 
peated Alick, suspecting nothing; and 
again Mr. Gryce smiled as he dug his 
fingers into the earth of a chrysalis-box. 
How pleasant it was to pull the strings 
and see his puppets dance ! 

Of course, Mr. Birkett’s consent was a 
necessary preliminary to Alick’s depart- 
ure, but there was no difficulty about it. 
The military rector was tired to death, 
so he used to say, of his zealous young 
aide-de-camp, and hailed the prospect 
of getting rid of him handsomely with 
a frank pleasure not flattering to poor 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


Alick’s self-love. “Certainly, my dear 
boy, certainly,” he said. “ It will be 
better for you to have a place of your 
own, where you can carry out your new 
ideas. You see I am an old man now, 
and have learnt the value of letting well 
alone. You are in all the fever- time of 
zeal, and believe that vice and ignorance 
are like the walls of Jericho, to fall down 
when you blow your trump. I do not. 
But on the whole, it is as well that you 
should learn the realities of life for your- 
self, and carry your energies where they 
may be useful.” 

“ Then you do not mind ?” asked Alick 
boyishly. 

The rector gave a loud clear laugh. 
“Mind! a thousand times no,” he said, 
rubbing his plump white hands. “ I can 
manage well enough alone, and if I can- 
not there are dozens of young eligibles 
ready to jump at the place. Mind ! no. 
Go in Heaven’s name, and may you be 
blessed in your undertaking!” 

The last words came in as grace-lines, 
and with them Alick felt himself dis- 
missed. 

If the rector had been facile to deal 
with, Mrs. Corfield was not. When she 
heard of the proposed arrangement, and 
that she was to lose her boy for the sec- 
ond time out of her daily life, and more 
permanently than before, her grief was 
as intense as if she had been told of his 
approaching death. She wept bitterly, 
and even bent herself to entreaty ; but 
Alick, to whom North Aston had become 
a dungeon of pain since Learn went, held 
pertinaciously to his plan — not without 
sorrow, but surely without yielding. He 
was fascinated by the idea of a cure 
where he might be sole master, not 
checked by rectorial ridicule when he 
wished to establish night schools or 
clothing clubs, penny savings banks, or 
any other of the schemes in vogue for the 
good of the poor ; thinking too, not un- 
wisely, that the best heal-all for his sor- 
row was to be found in change of scene 
and more arduous work together. Also, 
he thought that if his vague tentative 
advertisements in the papers, which he 
dared not make too evident, had as yet 
brought nothing, some moi^ satisfactory 


223 

way of discovering Team’s hiding-place 
might shape itself when he was alone, 
freer to act as he thought best. On all 
of which accounts he resisted his moth- 
er’s grief, and his own at seeing her 
grieve, and decided on going down to 
Monk Grange the next day. 

Had not Dr. Corfield been ailing at 
this time, the mother would have accom- 
panied her son. The possibility of damp 
sheets weighed heavy on her mind ; and 
landladies who filch from the tea-caddy, 
with landladies’ girls, pert and familiar, 
preparing insidious gruel and seductive 
cups of coffee, were the lions which her 
imagination conjured up as prowling for 
her Alick through the fastnesses of Monk 
Grange. Circumstances, however, were 
stronger than her desire; and, happily 
for Alick, she was perforce obliged to 
remain at home while her darling went 
out from the paternal nest to shake those 
limp wings of his, and bear himself up 
unassisted in a new atmosphere in the 
best way he could. 

It was on the cold and rainy evening 
of a cold and rainy summer’s day that 
Alick arrived at Monk Grange — an even- 
ing without a sunset or a moon, stars or 
a landscape ; painful, mournful, as those 
who dwell in the North Country know 
only too well as the tears on its face of 
beauty. He had driven in a crazy old gig 
from Wigton, and the nine miles which 
lay between that not too brilliant town 
and the desolate fell-side hamlet which 
he had been so fain to make his own 
spiritual domain had not been such as 
disposed him to a cheerful view of things. 
The rain had fallen in a steady, pitiless 
downpour, which seemed to soak through 
every outer covering and to penetrate the 
very flesh and marrow of the tired trav- 
eler as it pattered noisily on the umbrella 
and streamed over the leather apron ; and 
the splash of the horse’s hoofs through 
the liquid mud and broad tracts of stand- 
ing water was as dreary as the “ splash, 
splash” of Burger’s ballad. And when 
all this was over, and they drew up at 
the Blucher, with its handful of desolate 
gray hovels round it, the heart of the 
man sank at the gloomy surroundings 
into the midst of which he had flung 


224 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM E UAH AS. 


himself. But the zeal of the churchman 
was as good a tonic for him as the best 
common sense, and he waited until to- 
morrow and broad daylight before he 
allowed himself to even acknowledge 
an impression. The warm fireside at the 
Blucher cheered him too, and his supper 
of eggs and bacon and fresh crisp havre- 
bread satisfied such of his physical cra- 
vings as, unsatisfied, make a man’s spir- 
itual perceptions very gaunt. 

He went to bed, slept, and the next 
day woke up to a glory of sun and sky, 
a brilliancy of coloring, a photographic 
sharpness and clearness of form, a sug- 
gestion of beauty beyond that which was 
seen, which transformed the place as if 
an angel had passed through it in the 
night. As he tramped about the sordid 
hamlet he forgot the rude uncouthness 
of men and place for a kind of ecstasy 
at the loveliness about him. Every jut- 
ting rock of granite shone in the sun like 
polished ja^er, and the numberless lit- 
tle rills trickling down the fell-sides were 
as threads of silver, now concealed in the 
gold of the gorse, and now whitening the 
purple of the heather. The air was full 
of blithesome sounds. Overhead the sky- 
larks sang in jocund rivalry, mounting 
higher and higher as if they would have 
beaten their wings against the sun the 
bees made the heather and the thyme 
musical as they flew from flower to flow- 
er, and the tinkling of the running rills 
was like the symphony to a changeful 
theme. It was in real truth a transfor- 
mation, and the new-comer into the fit- 
ful, seductive, disappointing North felt 
all its beauty, all its meaning, and gave 
himself up to his delight as if such a day 
as yesterday had never been. 

After he had done what he wished to 
do in the village, he went up the fell- 
side road to Windy Brow, and, obeying 
his instructions, asked when he got there 
“ if Miss Leonora Darley was at home.” 

‘‘Na, she bain’t,” said Jenny, eying 
poor innocent Alick as a colley might 
eye a w'olf sniffing about the fold. ‘‘T’ 
auld mistress is.” 

‘‘ Say Mr. Corfield, please,” said Alick ; 
and Jenny, telling him to ‘‘gang intilt 
parlor,” scuffled oft' to Keziah, pottering 


over some pickled red cabbage, which 
made the house smell like a vinegar- 
cask. 

‘‘I’ve heard tell of you,” said Miss 
Gryce as she came in wiping her hands 
on a serviceable and by no means lux- 
urious cloth: ‘‘Emmanuel wrote me a 
letter about you. You’re kindly welcome 
to Monk Grange, but you’re only a hav- 
erel to look at. Take a seat, and tell 
me — how’s Emmanuel, my brother?” 

‘‘He was well when I saw him the day 
before yesterday : at least he said noth- 
ing to the contrary,” answered Alick with 
his conscientious literalness. 

‘‘I like that,” said Keziah. also eying 
him, but as a colley might have eyed a 
strange sheep, not a wolf. ‘‘A random 
rory would have made no difference be- 
tween now and two days back, and be- 
lieving and being. You cannot be over- 
particular in the truth, I take it.” 

Alick blushed, shifted his place and 
looked uneasy. And again, as so often 
before, it came across him : had he done 
right, judged by the highest law, to con- 
ceal the truth as he knew it about Learn ? 

‘‘ Hoot, man ! there’s no call for you 
to sit on pins and needles in that' fash- 
ion,” said Keziah. ‘‘It’s a daft body 
that cannot hear a word of praise with- 
out turning as red as a turkey-cock and 
fidging like a parched pea on a drum- 
head. I’ve not turned much of you over 
yet, and maybe I’ll come to what I’ll 
have no mind to praise ; so keep your 
fidges till you are touched up with the 
other end of the stick. And so you are 
to be our new priest, are you ?” 

‘‘ I am going to offer myself for a time,” 
said Alick. 

‘‘For a time? That’s a thing as has 
two sides to it. If you are not to our 
minds, that’s its good side : if you are, 
and we are not to yours, that’s its bad. 
I doubt if our folk will care to be played 
Jumping Joan with in that fashion.” 

‘‘I will be guided by the will of the 
Lord,” said Alick reverently. 

‘‘ Humph ! I like the words better nor 
the chances in them,” returned Keziah, 
taking a pinch of snuff. ‘‘But maybe 
things ’ll work round as one would have 
them ; and whether you stay or you do 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS, 


225 


not, the Lord’s will be done, amen ! and 
His grace follow you, young man !” 

“Thank you,’’ said Alick with emo- 
tion, getting up and shaking the pickle- 
stained and snuff-discolored hand. 

“ I have a message for Miss Leonora 
Darley,’’ he then said after a pause. 
“ Mr. Gryce told me I was to be sure and 
tell him how she was looking.’’ 

“ Eh, poor bairn ! she is not very first- 
rate,’’ the old woman answered tender- 
ly. At least it was tenderness in her : 
in another person her voice and manner 
might have been taken for crabbedness 
and impatience. “ She’s up by there, on 
the fell somewhere. She a’most lives on 
the fell-side, but it don’t make her look 
as brisk as I should like. Have you 
seen the view from our brow-top ? It is 
a real bonny one ; and you’ll maybe find 
Leonora not far off. I don’t think she 
wanders far.’’ 

“ I should like to see it,’’ said Alick. 
“ The country altogether looks splendid 
to-day.’’ 

“Ay, it’s a bonny day enough if it 
would but last. Come your ways with 
me and I’ll set you out by the back door. 
You can come in again the same road if 
you’ve a mind.’’ 

On which she bustled up, and Alick, 
escorted by her, went through the house 
and on to the fell-side. 

It was, if possible, grander now than 
it had been in the earlier part of the 
day. The hot sun had cleared away the 
lingering mist, and the cloudless sky was 
like one large perfect opal, while the 
earth beneath shone and glistened as if 
it were a jewel set with various- colored 
gems. There was not a mean or sordid 

15 


thing about. Touched by the splendid 
alchemy of the sun, the smallest circum- 
stance was noble, the poorest color glo- 
rious. Alick stood on the fell-brow en- 
tranced : then turning, he saw slowly 
coming across the pathless green a young 
slight figure dressed in gray. He look- 
ed as it came near, and his heart beat 
with a force that took all power from 
him. It was absurd, he knew, but there 
was such a strange look of Learn about 
that girl ! He stood and watched her 
coming along with that slow, graceful, un- 
dulating Step which was Learn ’s birthright. 
Was he mad? Whs he dreaming ? What 
was this mocking trick of eyesight that 
was perplexing him ? Surely it was mad- 
ness ; and yet — no, it could be no one 
else. Supreme, beloved, who else could 
personate her so as to cheat him ? 

She came on, her eyes always fixed 
on the distance, seeing nothing of Alick 
standing dark against the sky. She 
came nearer, nearer, till he saw the 
glory of her eyes, the curve of her lip, 
and could count the curling tresses on 
her brow. Then he came down from 
the height and strode across the space 
between them. 

She lifted up her eyes and saw him. 
For an instant the sadness cleared out 
of them as the mists had cleared from 
the sky : her pathetic mouth broke into 
a smile, and she held out both her hands. 
“Alick, dear Alick! my good Alick!’’ 
she cried in a voice of exquisite tender- 
ness. 

“My queen!’’ he said kneeling, his 
honest upturned face wet with tears. 
“Lost and now found!” 





CHAPTER XLI. 

IN HIS RIGHT MIND. 

N othing is easier to a clever wo- 
man than to catch a heart at the 
rebound. Samson, wounded and sor- 
rowful, lays his weary head in the lap 
of that watchful Delilah who has been 
biding her time, knowing that it would 
come, and when he wakes up again he 
finds his locks shorn, and his strength, 
with his freedom, gone. Then it is too 
late. Sorrow, revolt, complaint, — all are 
of no avail. He has nothing for it but 
to accept the irremediable quietly and 
sleep on, determined to find his dreams 
pleasant and his pillow sweet, as 'some 
good, careless fellows do. Others, unfor- 
tunately for themselves, resent the mis- 
take that they have made and the snare 
into which they have fallen, and cannot, 
do what they will, reconcile themselves 
to their disaster or refrain from shak- 
ing their chains dismally. Adelaide had 
been Edgar’s Delilah, watchful, patient, 
respectable. She had bided her time 
and waited, and now she was reaping 
her reward. Samson had delivered him- 
self into her hand, and she had bound 
^him with fetters stronger than green 
withes. The decisive words had been 
spoken, the needful preliminaries ar- 
ranged, and a few days now would see 
the great aim of her life fulfilled, and the 
crowning stone flung on the cairn of the 
delusive past. It was a proud moment 
for her ; and all the more in that she 
owed her success mainly to her own tact 
and determination, for the very fitness of 
things which had helped to bring this 
marriage about had been the fitness 
which she herself had created. 

There was to be no vulgar parade, no 
noisy rejoicing, at this wedding between 
the owner of the Hill and the rector’s 
daughter ; only simple arrangements of 
that solid magnificence and proud ex- 
clusiveness which are so dear to Eng- 
lish county families, and which assort 
226 


better with their condition than the more 
noisy demonstrations, the more showy 
finery, of the town-bred rich. Besides, 
though the marriage was one in every 
way satisfactory, judging by outside facts 
— the only measuring tape held by the 
world — it had its own secret history 
which did not agree with a very demon- 
strative ceremonial; and Adelaide was 
wise, though she was ambitious. She 
was content to have and to hold that 
which she had so long desired, without 
laying too much stress on the> manner 
of assignment. To be installed mistress 
of the Hill and head of the society for 
ten miles round were the two clauses in 
the marriage lines which were to the real 
purpose. Whether she had one brides- 
maid or a dozen, and whether her father 
gave a breakfast to ten guests or a hun- 
dred, were adventitious circumstances not 
affecting the central fact. And if we 
have that central fact set square and 
firm, who in his senses troubles himself 
about the fringe of adventitious circum- 
stance ? When we are buying a house 
we look to the beams and the walls, not 
to the Banksia roses up the porch or to 
the volute of the cornice. 

The marriage between these two per- 
sons so manifestly made for each other 
had not been arranged in a dark corner, 
but neither had it been paraded in broad 
day or published at the market-cross. If 
there was no bond of secrecy to be kept, 
no blare of trumpets had been sounded. 
It was quietly announced now to one, 
now to another, as it might chance, and 
thus filtered noiselessly through the place 
and beyond till it came at last to Alick 
Corfield down at Monk Grange, doing 
his best to lift up Learn in her own esteem 
by his devotion, and to soften the intenser 
bitterness of her life by the unchanging 
sweetness of his love. 

Here again his principles and his affec- 
tion, his conscience and his heart, came 
into collision. Should he tell her of this 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM E ONE AS. 


227 


marriage? She ought to know, must 
know some day, but he shrank from the 
painful task of enlightening her. Good 
and true in soul as he was, he was weak 
where his affections were concerned. He 
had been bred on a wrong plan for the 
pracj;ice of sharp mental surgery, and 
though capable of suffering martyrdom 
on his own account, was incapable of 
giving pain to others, least of all to those 
whom he loved. 

Wherefore he held his peace, and 
Learn was still ignorant of the fact that 
Edgar Harrowby was, as North Aston 
phrased it, in his right mind at last, and 
about to marry Adelaide Birkett, as he 
ought to have done when he first came 
home. Sufficient to the day, he thought. 
Beam’s health had run down too much 
to make it advisable to give her any 
kind of shock, and it was best to let her 
present wounds heal before others were 
inflicted. Let her, then, rest in peace 
and blessed unconsciousness of the evil 
to come, till it could be no longer warded 
off. If he was doing wTong not to tell 
her, he would bear the burden on his 
own soul, as he had been content to bear 
that other, and would, had it been pos- 
sible, have borne others even weightier. 

Edgar had behaved very well : Ade- 
laide had behaved very well. On all 
regarding Learn he had kept absolute 
silence, and she had respected that si- 
lence. He had not confessed that he 
had been the accepted lover of Learn 
Dundas for the space of two days and 
a half; and she, though she knew that 
something had happened between them, 
never inquired how much, nor yet what 
had been the circumstance which had 
sent Edgar to her broken-hearted on 
that Friday evening, and which, in all 
probability, had been the circumstance 
that had caused Beam’s mysterious dis- 
appearance. In her heart she was curi- 
ous enough. That was but natural : she 
would not have been a woman else. 
Outwardly, she was restrained and sen- 
sible, and let the mystery pass as a thing 
not interesting, because not concerning, 
her. But she often pondered on it in 
secret, and wearied herself in conjec- 
tures, not one of which was absolutely 


true, though the main thread of all was 
not far from the truth — Learn had done 
something , shameful, and Edgar had 
found it out. 

What that shameful thing was, and 
how Edgar had found it out, remained 
the double heart of the mystery which 
no conjecture could lay bare. It said 
something for Adelaide’s strength of 
purpose that she could accept her ig- 
norance on such a matter so quietly. 
Perhaps she looked through the coming 
years to the time when marriage had 
made her safe and she need not be so 
careful as now, when by coaxings at the 
right moment, and, if coaxings would 
not do, by reproaches, tears, untiring 
iterations, which, like constant drop- 
pings wearing down the granite, grind 
down into plasticity the hardest will at 
last, she would be able to force from the 
husband safely secured in the matrimo- 
nial fastnesses what it would be danger- 
ous to even filch by a clever trick from 
the free-standing lover, with marriage- 
able loopholes still before him. At all 
events, she refrained from questioning 
now, and Edgar was profoundly grateful 
to her for her sweet delicacy and sym- 
pathetic feeling. 

For himself, his satisfaction in his mar- 
riage was of a rather grim kind. It was 
marriage and it was not love, which for 
a man whose line of life had hitherto 
run the reverse way seems hard to bear. 
It was all the difference between gray 
days and rosy ones ; and to those used to 
roses, leaves gray and dead are poor sub- 
stitutes. Still, the marriage had its con- 
fessed advantages, and he must be con- 
tent to have saved so much out of the 
fire. On this broad philosophic basis, 
then, he built up his hopes for the future, 
and made no doubt that he should get 
on as well as his neighbors. And when 
he was meditating after dinner, well fed, 
resigned and soothed, he used to ask 
himself. Would Learn have been the 
right kind of wife for him, after all ? 
If the Hill had been a South Sea island, 
and himself and Learn the only inmates, 
there would have been no doubt as to 
their fitness for each other ; but he was 
Major Harrowby, a magistrate and a 


228 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


gentleman, fettered by conventionalities 
of all kinds, not a dusky youth with a 
floral wardrobe and as few , responsibil- 
ities as garments; and being this, per- 
haps — with a heavy sigh — Adelaide was 
the wiser bargain. She looked very pret- 
ty to-day, and talked very nicely, and he 
was glad she liked those quenelles: he 
liked women to have good taste. 

All this was the right kind of thing for 
a woman of Adelaide’s composed tem- 
perament and quiet habits. The tumult- 
uous passion of an ardent lover would 
have embarrassed her, and the constant 
presence of an adoring one would have 
bored her ; and she disliked to be em- 
barrassed quite as much as she disliked 
to be bored. What she wanted was rea- 
sonableness, social success and decorum ; 
and she had all in the exact proportions 
desired. Therewith she made herself 
content, and regretted nothing of that in- 
ner sweetness, that poetic fervor, which, 
not having, she did not miss, and which, 
had she had, she would not have under- 
stood. 

When the morning came the village 
flocked to the church to see a wedding 
by no means so pretty as Josephine’s, 
but infinitely more stately. It was the 
solid compressed weight of gold as com- 
pared with the fluffy bulk of feathers ; 
and only fools like feathers better than 
gold. To be sure, certain circumstances 
were the same as before. There were 
the village children, for instance, but 
instead of the brilliant combination of 
scarlet and white and blue that had 
made such a pretty show in the early 
summer, their dresses now were a dull 
dark purple, as more serviceable in the 
coming winter. To be sure, too, they 
Strewed flowers on the fair bride’s path 
as she left the church, successful at last, 
but for the roses and jessamine, honey- 
suckle and fair Mary lilies that had been 
dear, comely Josephine’s metaphorical 
way of walking, hollyhocks and dahlias, 
chrysanthemums and melancholy ama- 
ranths, were Adelaide’s. The sisters of 
the bridegroom assisted again as before, 
but instead of the bright rose-color which 
composed so well and symbolized flow- 
ers, the silver gray in which the Misses 


Harrowby were dressed had a sugges- 
tion of mourning that was scarcely in^ 
spiriting for the occasion. No pretty 
girls — ^the one like a monthly rose, the 
other like a burning pomegranate bud — 
were there to eclipse by their beauty the 
faded homeliness of the elders ; only the 
bride herself to show in solitary beauty 
amid so much that was less than fair. 
And ^ven little Fina was but a spectator 
this time, not an official, and not so much 
caressed by Major Harrowby as before. 

There was no ball in the evening ; no 
fond wishes roused into activity because 
of the suggestiveness of that morning’s 
ceremonies ; no intoxicating revelations, 
no bewildering ecstasies to grow out of 
it. All was as cold and smooth as ice — 
the dresses, the breakfast, the speeches, 
the emotions : he was simply in his right 
mind, and she was Mrs. Harrowby of 
the Hill. 

There was no rushing off, either, to 
Paris and a fatiguing continental tour 
as the best method of beginning mar- 
ried life and rubbing down the inevi- 
table angles of awkwardness and dif- 
ference. Edgar had not the heart to 
travel, and Adelaide had the true insular 
contempt for all things foreign and un- 
known. It was more to the taste of both 
to go to the lakes of Cumberland and 
Westmoreland than to any overrated 
millpond of Como or Lucerne. Septem- 
ber is a grand month for the North in 
general, and they were not yet more 
than halfway through ; the early au- 
tumn tints of wood and mountain-side 
are even more enchanting than the ten- 
der greenery of the spring; and both 
argued in concert that every patriotic 
Briton ought to be acquainted with the 
choice bits of his native land before 
running after transmarine show-places. 
Hence they agreed, mutually consulting 
and consenting, that they would make 
a quiet little home-tour which would ful- 
fill a duty, save fatigue and not keep them 
too long from home. But as the rank 
and file of hearers are mainly thick-wit- 
ted, the report got about in North Aston 
that they were going to Scotland ; and 
it was Scotland that Alick heard from 
his mother, and Scotland that Mr. Gryce 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


229 


did not write to his sister. H ad he known 
the truth, he would have given Alick a 
hint, and Learn would have been watch- 
ed, lest by a miracle she had fallen into 
danger ; for, after all, it would seem as 
if it must needs be a miracle that would 
bring her path and theirs to a common 
point of contact. 


CHAPTER XLII. 

MY QUEEN STILL. 

Had Learn been suspicious or egois- 
tic, she would have seen that something 
unusual was pressing on Alick at this 
time. Always tender and respectful, his 
manner had had for the last few days a 
certain loving watchfulness of protection, 
a certain chivalrous devotion and knight- 
ly kind of reverence, which implied some- 
thing hurtful from which to defend, some- 
thing humiliating from which to shield 
her. 

It would have given any one else cause 
for thought, but Learn, once so sensitive 
and intolerant, seemed now to be scarce- 
ly touched by anything from without. 
When she caught Alick’s melancholy 
eyes fixed on her, full of tears, she only 
thought, “ Poor Alick ! how unhappy he 
is ! That is my doing and when he 
hovered about her, treating her with as 
much deference as if she had been some 
saintly princess condescending to her vas- 
sal, she murmured, “How good he is to 
me ! and I am so wicked !“ But she 
did not look deeper, nor ask herself why 
this goodness was so specially active 
now. 

And Alick was unhappy — as much for 
the change in Learn herself as for the 
grief that had to come to her when she 
should hear how soon the man whom 
she loved so faithfully had consoled him- 
self and taken another to fill the place 
which was to have been hers. If she 
would but be more like herself, and not 
so pathetically patient, not so mourn- 
fully gentle ! he thought tearfully. If 
only she would look at him with the old 
superb disdain, then turn away her eyes 
with the girlish scorn that had so often 
made him blush and writhe with pleased 


embarrassment, call him stupid, tell him 
he should not talk nonsense, that he 
knew nothing of what he was saying, 
and treat him with that grand manner 
of calm contempt, that exquisite assump- 
tion of superiority, which was the most 
delicious thing he had ever known, he 
would not be so unhappy. But now so 
patient, so humble, so sad. As a Chris- 
tian he knew that he ought to rejoice to 
see the pride of her heart broken and 
the grace of humility and penitence in 
its stead ; but as the boy who had grown 
into the man, worshiping, this spectacle 
of the discrowned queen with her pur- 
ple in the dust and her sceptre fallen 
from her hand was one that nearly 
broke his heart to see. 

His beloved young queen ! If she had 
been faithful to her mother, so would he 
be to her; and how stained and soiled 
soever her royal robes, with her crown 
trodden under foot in the mire and her 
sceptre broken in her guilty hand, she 
should still be to him regal, reverenced, 
adored — his queen if discrowned, his 
saintly princess condescending to her 
vassal — no rnatter how much she had 
been humbled, how far abased by sin 
and its shadow, shame. When with him 
she should at least feel her best self, and 
that she was with one to whom she never 
could be aught but noble and beloved. 
If circumstance and conscience had hu- 
miliated her, the reverence of love, the 
fidelity of respect, should reinstate her; 
and never in his most adoring moments 
at the old home had Alick paid her the 
profound devotion that he paid her now. 

One day they met on the fell as usual. 
They often met on the fell-side, for Al- 
ick, whose windows commanded Windy 
Brow, had learnt Beam’s habits by heart, 
as Edgar Harrowby had done before him, 
and a good field-glass told him all that he 
wanted to know. This was the day of 
Edgar’s marriage with Adelaide. It was 
just about this time, eleven o’clock, that 
the ceremony was being performed, and 
the vows, consecrated to Learn, passed 
on to her successor. But how little that 
beloved and discarded one knew what 
disloyalty to her memory was being 
enacted at this moment! and how ter- 


230 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


rible it would be to her when she did 
know, as some day she must ! 

Alick watching her as she wandered 
slowly on before, he striding after her to 
overtake her — as he should before she 
had quite reached the fell-top — felt his 
heart burn with indignation against the 
man who could not find in his love 
enough grace for her sin, who would 
not share her crime by his own sacrifice, 
of ideal purity. To him Learn, blood- 
stained and besmirched, was better than 
any one else clad in shining garments 
and accepted; and he hated Edgar Har- 
rowby, not because he had been loved, 
but because he had not been brave 
enough to accept the conditions of that 
love ; for, though Learn had told him 
nothing directly, he was sure that he 
knew all, and that she had fled from 
North Aston because, having confessed, 
Edgar had renounced. 

He felt, too, as if he could not let her 
out of his sight to-day — as if he must be 
at hand to protect her should the blow 
by some bad miracle fall on her dear 
head. It seemed as if the very bracken 
on the fell would whisper to her what 
cruel thing was being done to her mem- 
ory to-day, and as if he alone could help 
her, he alone protect her. 

Presently she stopped and sat down 
on a jutting bit of rock. Once so fibrous, 
firm, well knit, now her strength was soon 
exhausted. She easily lost her breath ; 
her heart had become more troublesome 
than ever was poor madame’s ; and the 
small arched feet that once gripped the 
ground like feet of steel now moved slow- 
ly and languidly, all their elasticity gone 
like the rest of her former power. Hence, 
she never got far from home now, and 
she was fain to walk so slowly, especial- 
ly on an ascent, that Alick’s long legs 
had no difficulty in overtaking her, how 
far soever her start might have been. 

He soon drew up to her, and stood 
before her as she sat. “Are you well 
to-day?” he asked anxiously, looking 
down on her as he stood towering above 
her, honest and ungainly, his rugged face 
full of tenderness. 

She was very white — white even to her 
lips — and looked, he thought, strangely 


wasted. The curling rings of dark hair, 
golden-edged, that came from beneath 
her hat were matted against her fore- 
head with the treacherous damps of 
weakness, and the mournful eyes, far 
too large and bright, with their dilated 
pupils and look of fixed pain, were en- 
circled by dark lines that made them 
look even larger and more mournful 
than before. Alick had thought her 
fearfully changed when he had first seen 
her on his arrival, but to-day she looked 
as if the bond between her and life had 
suddenly worn so slight it needed but a 
feather’s touch to break it altogether. 

“Well? Yes,” she answered quietly. 
“ Why do you ask ?” 

“I thought you looked a little ill — a 
little delicate,” said Alick anxiously. 

She drew a deep breath, checked at 
once by a sudden pain. “No,” she said 
when the spasm passed, “ I am not ill, 
but I am tired : I am always tired now.” 

“You ought to see a doctor. Why 
does not Miss Gryce send oyer to the 
town for one ?” said Alick, looking 
vaguely into the distance. 

“Why should she?” answered Learn. 
“ It is nothing.” 

“ It makes us all anxious to see you 
'look so ill,” he urged. “For our sakes 
you ought to take care of yourself, my 
dear, and see some one who would do 
you good.” 

She looked at him plaintively. “Who 
are ‘us’?” she said. “I have no one 
now.” 

Tears filled Alick’s eyes. Ah ! it had 
been always thus : he was nothing, nev- 
er had been anything, to her. He who 
had loved her best had harvested least. 

“Am I no one?” he asked, with noth- 
ing of jealous pain, only with a hopeless 
kind of despondency that scarcely rose 
to the level of entreaty, still less of re- 
proach. “You know what you are to 
me,” lovingly. 

She looked distressed, for a moment 
almost frightened. 

“ No, do not be afraid,” he continued, 
answering her look. “ I will not offend 
you. Learn. I love you too well to pain 
you by my own selfishness. I only want 
to help in your peace, your happiness.” 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


231 


“So you do,” she answered kindly. 
“You are all I have now. I should be 
very unhappy without you.” 

“ There is not much happiness for you 
here anyhow,” he answered. “At the 
best, and wishing to do the best, who 
can be of any good to you ? I am only 
an awkward kind of animal who would 
fight for you to the death, if need be, 
and protect you with my life. Learn, if it 
had to be done ; but I am no one. And 
Miss Gryce is good in her own way, and 
means to do what is right, but her place 
is no place for you. You have nothing 
there you ought to have, and how ter- 
rible it is to see you suffer as you do in 
such a household !” 

She raised her hand. “Hush!” she 
said gently : “ I suffer only what I de- 
serve.” And again looking at him kind- 
ly, she repeated, “And I have you.” 

“I know I ought to be glad to hear 
you say so ; and for myself, oh, you do 
not know, my dear, what pleasure it 
gives me — no, it is more than pleasure — 
to think that I can be of any use to you. 
But I cannot bear it, all the same,” said 
Alick, his lips quivering. “ It breaks my 
heart to see you so humble and so pa- 
tient, grateful to me I — so unlike your 
old imperious self. If only you would 
scold me sometimes, and tell me I am 
absurd, and a stupid cold-blooded Eng- 
lishman, and know nothing, as you used 
to do, I could bear your bitterest contempt 
better than this patience. It does not 
seem natural or good from you to me.” 

“ I used to be imperious when I had 
the right,” said Learn, “ or thought I had. 
Now every one is better than I am. You 
always were, but others are now.” 

“No, no!” cried Alick vehemently. 
“No, Learn ! • Remember — you were 
such a child : God himself cannot be 
angry with you, such a mere child as 
you were.” 

“ The thing is the same,” she answer- 
ed with a shudder. 

“ But if man sees the fact, God under- 
stands the circumstances,” cried Alick. 
“And the infinite Mercy reaches to all 
and redeems all.” 

“ Listen, Alick,” said Learn suddenly, 
raising her head and speaking as one 


who intended to speak to the point. “ I 
do not care to talk of myself, but I want 
to say something. When I went to 
school and they taught me, told me 
things I did not know, had not heard of 
— or, if I had, had disbelieved and des- 
pised — I began to see, after a time, that 
there was really something in the world 
besides mamma and Spain, and that 
mamma did not know everything, as I 
once thought. Then I began to think 
of what I had done. The older I grew 
the more I thought of it, and the more I 
saw it was wicked. I had not done it 
for wickedness, but it was, all the same. 
I thought I was doing right at the time : 
I only thought of mamma, and that I 
would protect her, and hinder her from 
being unhappy. When I came home I 
began to be most miserable of all. Ev- 
erything reminded me ; and I was so 
sorry for papa, and poor little Fina too. 
I had the thought of it always with me. 
I never lost it quite, though sometimes I 
did not think of it so clearly as at others. 
Sometimes I felt as if I must tell it to 
papa. I knew you knew, but I was 
ashamed to speak to you. I did not want 
to hear you say that you knew : I felt as 
if I could not have borne that.” 

“And yet you might have trusted me,” 
said Alick in a low voice. “ I respected 
you too much to give you pain.” 

“I knew that,” she answered; “still, 
I did not want to have to humble myself 
to you. Then — ” she stopped: a slight 
color came into her wan face and her eyes 
filled with tears, but she conquered her 
emotion and her reluctance, for this was 
a difficult passage to proud, reserved 
Learn, but she conquered herself as part 
of her penance, and went on — “then 
Major Harrowby was with me a good 
deal. You were ill, all the others were 
away, and I saw him nearly every day. 
I never thought of it when I was with 
him. I do not know why, but he seem- 
ed to rest me like sleep, and I never felt 
when with him that I had done such a 
dreadful crime. It went on like this till 
papa married. That evening he told me 
he loved me. And then, Alick, I knew 
that I loved him, and had loved him 
from the first without knowing it. Don’t 


232 


THE ATONEMENT OF 4.E AM FUND AS. 


let me cry, dear Alick — don’t, please !” 
She broke off with a sudden sob, cover- 
ing her face with her hands. 

“No, Learn, you must not cry,’’ said 
Alick, his own voice full of tears. “ It 
will make you ill, dear : you must not. 
And nothing, no one, is worth one of 
your tears,’’ he added vehemently, curs- 
ing Edgar in his heart with a passion that 
startled even himself. 

After a few moments Learn lifted up 
her face again. Once more, will had 
conquered weakness, and her eyes were 
dry. “You are so kind to me,’’ she said 
a little faintly. “You must not think I 
do not feel it because I do not say much. 
But I want to tell you all. I was so hap- 
py then !’’ she went on to say, clasping 
her thin hands nervously in each other. 
“For just two days, Alick — two days out 
of my life, my whole life. I cannot tell 
you what those two days were to me. 
When I look back it seems as if it had 
been a sudden ending of incessant pain 
or coming into the light from the dark. 
It was like heaven, and I felt so innocent 
and free ! Then there came that dread- 
ful storm. Do you remember it ? I was 
in my own room, and,’’ shuddering, “ one 
flash shot right over the Commandment 
table. It seemed to fall like a line of 
fire across that one : you know what I 
mean. Then I knew that I had been 
spoken to by some one from heaven, and 
made to understand that I was not fit to 
be his wife. I was a murderess. What 
an awful word ! I had forgotten till now 
who and what I really was. Now I had 
to remember. For his own sake, and 
because I loved him, I must give him 
up. And I did. I told him the truth, 
and we parted.’* 

“ It was a cowardly shame,’’ flashed 
Alick angrily: “he was not worthy of 
your love.’’ 

“No, no, don’t say that,’’ she answer- 
ed. “ It was right, quite right. He could 
not marry such a wretch as I am ; and 
would I have degraded him so much, 
when I loved him as I do ? He was 
quite wise and right to let me go. He 
loved me ; I know he loved me, and I 
am sure he loves me still : he is too no- 
ble to change like the wind. He could 


not do that. Perhaps when I die, and I 
am made good in purgatory — fit for him, 
great and good as he is — we shall meet 
in heaven and not part again. I do not 
think I could go on living if I did not 
believe that. It is the only thing I ask 
of God and the saints — to make me good 
enough to live with him in heaven when 
we both die. And sometimes I feel as if* 
God would be good and kind, and would 
listen to me and grant this to me.’’ 

She said this with a child’s fervor and 
a child’s simplicity, looking up to the 
sky with a prayer in her eyes that inter- 
preted itself. 

Alick did not speak. He felt suffo- 
cated, choked, by the bitter thought of 
how pitiably she was mistaken — by the 
knowledge that the love on which she 
had counted for all eternity had not last- 
ed two short months — that to-day was 
Edgar’s wedding-day, and while she 
spoke of living with him for ever he 
had forgotten her for Adelaide Birkett 
and the marriage which it was conven- 
tionally fitting and socially wise that he 
should make. 

“ I will tell you all now,’’ Learn said 
after a pause. “After I had confessed to 
Major Harrowby, I felt as if I could not 
live at home any longer, and as if I did 
not care who knew. I went to Mr. Gryce : 
I met him in the wood where I had seen 
him go, and told him, too, everything. 
He helped me, as he had said he would 
one day, for he had found it out, I do 
not know how. He made me call my- 
self Leonora. Darley, and brought me 
here as his adopted daughter. I do not 
think anything hurt me more, after I 
lost him^ than to deny mamma’s name 
and call myself by a false one. It was 
like denying mamma.’’ 

“ But it is safer if you do not want to 
be known,’’ said Alick soothingly. 

“Yes,’’ she sighed, “it is safer, but it is 
horrid all the same. But I have no right 
to complain,’’ she added hastily, as if to 
atone for the little flash of the old spirit 
that had broken out. “It is better too, 
as you say. No one knows me here, and 
no one at home knows where I am.’’ 

“ Not your father ?’’ 

“No,’’ she answered, her color rising. 


V THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


233 


**I wrote to papa and told him what I 
had done — told him everything, and that 
I would never trouble him again. As he 
took no pains to find me out, no one will. 
Sometimes I think, though, he. Major 
Harrowby, will want to find me. I se^m 
to dream of it sometimes.” 

Alick shivered. ” I hope not,” he said 
in an altered voice. 

‘‘Better not,” murmured Learn in a 
sad, heartbroken way. 

‘‘Better let me be the only one who 
knows where you are,” he said earnest- 
ly. ‘‘You can trust me.” 

‘‘And him too,” said Learn, as she 
would have said it of her mother. 

‘‘ I hope so, but I only know myself,” 
answered Alick. 

‘‘Yes, I can trust him; and you too,” 
she said with the sweetest little incli- 
nation of her head. ‘‘ I know how good 
and true you are, Alick.” 

‘‘ Oh, if she could but have loved me !” 
thought poor Alick. ‘‘ How I would have 
protected and cared for her — soothed her 
wounded spirit and raised her again in 
her own esteem ! But she gave her love 
where it was not prized, and Adelaide 
Birkett is fitter for him than Learn.” 
Which was the same, to his mind, as 
saying that to Edgar darkness was more 
beautiful than light, the winter a fairer 
season than the spring. Presently, an- 
swering his own thoughts, he said, in his 
honest, clumsy way, ‘‘ But you will forget 
him in time. Learn : you cannot go on 
like this for ever. It will wear you out : 
you must forget him and everything else, 
and be yourself again.” 

She looked up at him in astonishment. 
‘‘Forget Major Harrowby!” she repeat- 
ed in a low distinct voice. ‘‘What are 
you saying? How could I forget him? 
Have I forgotten mamma? Why should 
I ? He is the best and greatest man I 
have ever known. So noble ! so true ! 
I should die if I forgot him.” 

Alick groaned and turned away, and 
Learn looked at him for one instant in 
the superb way of olden days. Then her 
eyes softened and her face grew tender. 
She laid her hand on Alick’s arm, and 
said with exquisite pathos, ‘‘ Do not envy 
me the only joy I have. You are good 


to me — so good, my friend, my only one 
— but Edgar !” She hid her face in her 
hands, and Alick knelt down by her in 
a burst of anguish almost as bitter as her 
own. 

After this there was no more talk, and 
a long silence fell between them. Learn 
indeed seemed to have exhausted herself. 
Silent, reserved and frail, her long speak- 
ing, so unusual and so uncongenial to 
her, had evidently tried her greatly. 
The strong September wind, too, blew 
sharp and keen, and now the excitement 
of her confession was over she became 
faint and cold. But she got up and drew 
one or two checked, half-sobbing breaths,, 
looking round as if wakened up out of a 
sleep, and, shivering, said she would go 
home. 

She tottered, however, as she tried to 
walk, and was forced to take Alick’s arm 
to keep her from falling. Truly, she was 
strangely weak to-day. She wiped the 
clammy damps from her forehead and 
her lips, and said, in a half-pleasant, half- 
mournful tone, that she was ashamed to 
be so silly, and that she did not know 
what had come to her. 

As Alick felt her slight hand on his 
arm, and when he had to stop and let 
her lean against him to recover breath 
and gain strength enough to go on, he 
felt sick at heart for fear, but oh how 
tender, how full of love 1 In her palm- 
iest days he had never loved her as he 
did now, when, broken and humiliated, 
she dropped the last remnant of her 
pride, and to the full confession of her 
sin added also that of her weakness. 

‘‘How good you are!” she said again, 
as they were standing there on the fell, 
she leaning against his arm as if it had 
been the branch of a tree, the back of 
a chair, or any other merely inanimate 
method of support, he not only conceal- 
ing, but conquering, all personality of his 
love that he might the Tetter support, 
protect and assist her. ‘‘ How kind and 
generous ! I wonder you can bear with 
me at all.” 

“Surely,” he remonstrated, “I am 
honored by you. Learn — honored that 
you let me be anything to you — your 
dog, your slave.” 


234 


THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, 


“Do not say that,” she said. “You 
are pure and good, and I — ” She shud- 
dered. 

“And you are my queen still,” he an- 
swered. “Were you stained from head 
to heel with the soil of sin, you would 
always be the same to me, dear — always 
my flower, my poem, my lady supreme 
< and before all others.” 

“Poor Alick!” she sighed; and then 
no more was said till they reached the 
gate of the desolate home which was all 
that crime and sorrow had left her. 

At the gate she turned and said sim- 
ply, “ I lov^e you very dearly. You know 
that, don’t you ? You are my good, faith- 
ful Alick — like my own brother. You do 
not think me ungrateful ?” 

“God bless you !” said Alick fervently. 
“Now I am rewarded. Some day per- 
haps it will come — when we are both old 
people, and you have forgotten all this 
pain — some day, when we are old.” 

She smiled faintly, not quite taking in 
his full meaning. She did not refuse his 
sketchy picture, destroy his vague hope, 
but she knew in her heart that her life 
of love and happiness was over, and that 
it was not to be restored to her on this 
side the grave. But she smiled because 
of the irradiance on the faithful face of 
the man who loved her, and when they 
parted she pressed his hand for the first 
time in her life, and said again, “ Good 
Alick ! dear friend ! I do love you in my 
way. Don’t you know that I do ?” 

“As your dog,” he said, with the de- 
lighted gratitude of a dog, “ and you are 
my queen, now and ever.” 

This was their manner of parting on 
the day of Edgar Harrowby’s marriage 
with Adelaide Birkett at North Aston, 
just about the time when the health of 
the bride and bridegroom was proposed 
at the breakfast by Cyril Fairbairn. 


CHAPTER XLIII. 

ON THE FELL-SIDE. 

The autumn this year at the Lakes 
was one of the finest that had been 
known for many seasons. The winds 
were still, the rain forgot to fall, but the 


ground was not parched nor vegetation 
withered, for each evening the sunset 
mists crept up from lake and river to 
hang in soft clouds and wreaths about 
the hillsides and along the low-lying 
meadows, returning to the earth the 
sweet freshness which they had taken 
from it. Through the day the skies 
were cloudless, opalescent, brilliant, like 
the skies of a new creation ; the granite 
rocks and rugged mountain-tops stood 
out in clear air, bold in outline and with 
purple shadows firm and deep ; the fells 
were full of color and the woods rich in 
autumnal tints : altogether, it was an 
ideal time for the Lake-land, and the 
country was at its best. 

Though the days were short, yet they 
were so beautiful while they lasted, and 
allowed of so much to be done, that 
Edgar and Adelaide scarcely regretted 
the rapid closing in of the evenings. 
Besides, to tell the truth, neither was 
an enthusiast for this kind of majestic 
scenery, though both professed to be en- 
chanted as the right thing on a wedding- 
tour. It was the little farce each played 
to each and both failed to see through. 
The inns were luxurious, and not being 
overcrowded at this “back end of the 
season,” the two handsome young peo- 
ple, with their shining luggage, gorgeous 
attire, manners of command and well- 
filled purses, were as minor royalties to 
the landlord and waiters, and the “best 
of everything” was brought like tribute 
laid at their feet. 

They went everywhere, if the way was 
not too rough, the excursion not too long, 
and Adelaide would not be too much 
fatigued — saw everything in a leisurely, 
grandiose way, not giving themselves 
much trouble, but “doing the Lakes” 
with that conscientious indifference which 
makes the doing the main fact, and lets 
the enjoyment take care of itself. It 
was very beautiful, very quiet, very fas- 
cinating altogether ; nevertheless, they 
would not be sorry, they thought, when 
the tour was over and they were settled 
at North Aston to begin life in earnest 
on their own plan and in their own do- 
main. 

They had worked gradually through 


/ 

THE ATONEMENT 

their self-appointed task, beginning with 
Coniston as their first centre and ending 
with dear Derwehtwater as their last ; 
and now they were returning home. It 
was time, for quite suddenly the weather 
had parted with its gorgeous brilliancy 
and had become dim and broken. The 
chill frosts of early October had killed 
the colors which a fortnight ago had been 
so intense, while the rising wind blew 
down showers of fluttering leaves, and 
the trees, which only so short a while 
ago glowed with crimson and shone with 
gold, were now mere naked boles, rayed 
with branches bleak and bare. The 
glory had disappeared, and it was in- 
deed time- to go home. 

They were returning by way of Car- 
lisle and the beautiful banks of the Eden. 
Edgar had a fancy, too, to see something 
of the country lying to the north of the 
mountains, that tract, rough and wild, at 
the back of Skiddaw, which no one ever 
sees. 5^sides the old couplet, 

Caldbeck and Caldbeck fells 

Is worth all England else — 

as halting in grammar as it is inexact in 
statement — had always struck his imag- 
ination. What if that rough tract was a 
mineral El Dorado, and there was more 
than a chance of a fortune to be made 
by the pick and the borer ? A friend of 
his, who had visited the country, had 
once said so, and Mr. Gryce had been 
heard to speak enthusiastically of the 
Roughton Gill Mines ; also of some 
others wherein he had dropped much 
of that inherited gear which Sister Ke- 
ziah kept in stockings and between the 
flock and the cover of her mattress. Ed- 
gar, a gambler in his own way like most 
men, had a fancy for abstract mining, 
and thought he should like to see this 
wild district with its hypothetical fortune 
lying a hundred feet below the surface. 
So they set off on Saturday, intending 
to drive from Derwentwater by Bassan- 
thwaite and Ulldale to Caldbeck. where 
they would “rough it” for the night, and 
the next day, Sunday, take a short survey 
of the country, and then move a stage 
onward to pretty, leafy, restful Seberg- 
ham. It would be a pleasant ending to 


OF TEAM DUNDAS, 235 

the tour, if only the weather would keep 
fair. 

Things began fairly well for the trav- 
elers. They set out perhaps a little late, 
considering the time of year, but Ade- 
laide was not an early riser, and they 
would be housed before the dead dark 
came on them. They got through the 
beautiful part of the drive under Skid- 
daw and through Bassanthwaite credit- 
ably enough, when Edgar, who had a 
good organ of locality, and believed in 
himself even more than he was justified 
in doing, saw, as he walked up the Hawse, 
that a short cut would take him over one 
of the outlying fells, whence he could, 
strike the main road and meet the car- 
riage after a practicable little detour 
which would be only a pleasant walk. 
He waited for the carriage to join him, 
and told Adelaide that he meant to cut 
across the fell — it was a mere trifle, not 
over two miles at the outside — and that 
he should meet her after she had gone 
about five miles round. 

“ I will come with you,” said Adelaide. 
“You are sure it is not more than two 
miles ?’’ 

“I should say it is not quite that,” he 
answered; “but,” anxiously, “you had 
better not come, dear. The way may 
be rough, and you are not a very heroic 
walker.” 

“I am good for two miles,” she said; 
“ and really it is rather cold in the car- 
riage. Besides, it is so dull sitting here 
alone. No, I will come with you, Edgar.” 

“As you like, of course,” he said re- 
luctantly, “ but I do not vouch for any- 
thing. And I do not want to see you 
tired.” 

“ I shall not be tired by a two miles’ 
walk,” she answered with her calm de- 
cision ; and though he had proposed this 
diversion mainly to be a short time alone 
— the honeymoon closeness of compan- 
ionship beginning to pall on him — for 
the sake of that politeness which he was 
too well bred to let drop even with his 
nearest relations, he was obliged to con- 
sent to her proposal to go with him, and 
even to feign the pleasure he did not 
feel. 

It was now about one o’clock, and 


236 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


after they had left the carriage and were 
ascending the fell, the day, which had 
not been too promising from the begin- 
ning, broke suddenly, as days sometimes 
do in the North. The sky, which had 
been always sunless and overcast, be- 
came thick and heavy with clouds ; the 
wind dropped, but the air was damp and 
cold ; and a mist crept up from the earth 
which gathered and thickened till soon 
the whole distance, and now things near 
at hand, were blotted out as if a shroud 
was being woven round the face and 
form of prostrate Nature. Colder grew 
the still and windless air, denser the roll- 
ing clouds of mist — so dense that it was 
as penetrating as rain ; all landmarks 
were gone and path there was none : 
and there, alone on a rough fell-side, 
without a guide, a compass, or the faint- 
est knowledge of their direction, caught 
in a mist through which they could not 
see two feet before them, Edgar and 
Adelaide transacted the last chapter of 
their honeymoon book of travels. No 
shouting brought back a human echo ; 
once they heard the far-off barking of a 
dog and the bleating of some frightened 
sheep, and once they fell into the midst 
of a herd of startled cattle, whereat Ade- 
laide screamed, and was nearly knocked 
down by one of the young steers starting 
off at full speed, scared on his side by 
her cries ; now they came upon a bog, 
where they sank in an instant far over 
their ankles, and now they stumbled 
and slipped on a steep bank of shingle, 
lying there like one of the waste places 
of creation. 

They did not know with what treach- 
erous swiftness these mists gather up 
from the mountain-sides and roll along 
the moorlands, nor how utterly bewil- 
dering they are. Seen through them, no 
object has its proper value. A boulder 
is an unscalable mountain-wall, a sheep 
is as big as a cow, and a cow like an ele- 
phant, and you see the precipice only 
when it is yawning at your feet, and per- 
haps when it is too late to save the fatal 
step that plunges you into eternity. It 
was of no use to sit down now and to 
bewail because they had- been caught in 
one of these treacherous uprisings and 


swathed with Nature in her shroud. They 
must struggle on in the hope to find a 
place of refuge somewhere : if only the 
poorest hut of a moorland hind, it would 
be welcome to them in their present 
straits ; and they must do their best, go 
on, keep up both strength and courage, 
for the chance of finding such a shelter 
if nothing more satisfactory. 

Adelaide had not said much. She was 
frightened, and now began to be tired ; 
but she did not cry — to be seen. Scarce- 
ly either could she reproach her husband 
with their misfortunes. It had been his 
proposal certainly to walk across the fell, 
but her own will to accompany him, and 
one can hardly rate a man for the sud- 
den uprising of a mountain-mist. Nev- 
ertheless, if she was silent she was more 
angry than sorrowful, and thought the 
reproaches which she did not say. As 
the hours passed her fatigue and fear 
increased, and her reticence and self- 
control slackened in proportion. She 
had held on bravely enough for about 
two hours, but now her courage gave 
way, and sitting down on a stone she 
declared that she could go no farther, 
that they were lost for ever, and that she 
should die here where they were ; and 
why had Edgar been so foolish and so 
wicked as to walk across the fell when 
he knew neither the country nor the dis- 
tance, and when he might have seen the 
mist coming up ? Women in distress are 
never reasonable, and Adelaide was no 
better than her sex. 

Edgar’s methods of comfort went for 
very little. His wife was not enough in 
love with him personally to be content 
in that love or consoled by his caresses. 
And truly the situation was painful. 
There have been more deaths than one 
of those lost on the mountains and the 
moors, and why not they as well as 
others ? Shoutings were in vain : there 
was nothing to be seen through this 
dense cloud enveloping everything, and 
no chance of being found by wandering 
hind or passing traveler. It was terrible. 
Wet to the skin, chilled to the marrow, 
lost in a thick white fog on a pathless 
fell-side moor, no wonder that poor Ad- 
elaide sat down and cried when her 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


237 


powers were exhausted, and with them 
her endurance. 

The day wore on, and the desolate 
bride more than once wished aloud that 
Edgar had never left his precious Learn 
Dundas to come to her. The glories of 
her state as mistress of the Hill were 
fading fast out of her mind, and to die 
on a wretched Cumberland moor as Ed- 
gar Harrowby’s wife was not the kind 
of apotheosis which she coveted. She 
had wanted to be his wife for the solid 
goods that her wifehood would bring her, 
not for the silly transports of a lovesick 
girl mated to the man of her choice, and 
content with a desert if shared with him. 
That was all very well in story-books and 
poetry, but when you come to the con- 
crete miseries of wet feet, thin boots, 
garments soaked through and through, 
rain, hunger, danger, distress and deso- 
lation, poetry flies into space and only 
the concrete miseries remain. Ade- 
laide’s appreciation of romance was lim- 
ited, and just now she would have pre- 
ferred the Yellow Dwarf in a luxurious 
castle to Edgar Harrowby and this cold, 
bleak, misty fell-side wilderness of bog 
and shingle. 

Bitter thoughts like these, crudely 
spoken, coldly heard, did not help to 
make their miserable situation more tol- 
erable ; but they stripped off the disguise 
which had been carved out by fitness, 
and showed her own soul nakedly to 
herself, and to Edgar as well. It was 
like tearing away a beautiful veil from 
a hideous object to hear her bitter re- 
proaches, her still more bitter regrets. 
It made Edgar feel as if all life had sud- 
denly become a lie — as if he had lived 
until now in a dream, and had just awa- 
kened out of it ; yet he recognized in 
himself a strange kind of indifference 
to the discovery, as if he had known all 
through his dream that he had not mar- 
ried Adelaide Birkett for love, nor yet 
believing in her love for him. He had 
dreamt that he had, but even in his 
dream he had not been persuaded. 

Conventional fitness is a fine basis for 
a marriage in its own way, but then the 
marriage must remain in the convention- 
al groove. When you come to love and 


the elemental facts of human nature, to 
possible death on a bleak fell-side, and 
to circumstances which do not admit 
of posturizing, then the conventional fit- 
ness is nowhere, and the gap where love 
ought to be, and is not, is the chief thing 
visible. 

This miserable state of things lasted 
for hours that seemed an eternity, and 
then, as the evening came on, the mist 
lightened and gradually dispersed, so 
that Edgar could see where they were, 
and something of the surrounding coun- 
try. They were on the top, or rather on 
the slope, of a fell. About two miles and 
a half below them lay a small cluster of 
houses — about half a mile off, one solitary 
square stone house, pitched straight be- 
fore them on the descent. There was 
not another human habitation to be seen, 
save one, a little shieling on the ascent 
opposite to where they stood. Here, too, 
was a road — as Edgar conjectured, the 
road which led from this little hamlet be- 
low to Caldbeck and the world beyond. 

“ Can you exert yourself so much as to 
get to this house below us ?” Edgar ask- 
ed, speaking to his wife with a certain 
distant, chilling courtesy that made her 
wince more than his anger would have 
done. 

Now that she was saved, and was not 
going to die on the fell-side, how sorry 
she was that she had let her true mind 
be seen ! But men are foolish creatures 
in the hands of a clever woman ; and 
she would, maybe, recover by tact all 
that she had lost by impatience. She 
put her hand over her eyes, as if to clear 
them. “Yes, with your arm,’’ she answer- 
ed with a deep sigh, suggestive of flinging 
off a weight and coming to herself. “I 
think I have been a little delirious,’’ she 
then said plaintively, and again cleared 
her eyes and again sighed deeply. 

“ It has been a trying time,’’ said Edgar 
coldly, offering his hand; “but come, 
you had better not sit longer. Let us 
take advantage of this break and make 
the best of our way to the house below.” 

He spoke quietly, but with the air of 
a man who does what he should out of 
self-respect, not love, and whose tender- 
ness is not personal so much as official. 


238 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


“How good you are!” said Adelaide 
prettily as she laid both her hands in 
his, and with pain and difficulty rose to 
her feet. 

He made no answer, but drew her 
hand on his arm, and, always carefully 
tending her, always helping and protect- 
ing her, went in unbroken silence down 
the half mile intervening between them 
and Windy Brow. And as Adelaide was 
really stiff and tired and uncomfortable, 
she left off trying to coax him, and nursed 
her misery and displeasure in a silence 
as unbroken as his own. 

It was dusk when they opened the 
broken gate hanging on one hinge, more 
like a gap than a guard, between the di- 
lapidated fences, and passed up the weed- 
grown path lying by the side of the po- 
tato-patch and the cabbages, in full view 
of the windows of the sitting-room. As 
they came up Edgar’s quick eyes saw a 
figure dressed in gray, with a dead-white 
face, pass swiftly by the window, and as 
he knocked at the door he heard an in- 
ner door hastily locked. Stories of mur- 
derers and maniacs flashed across Ade- 
laide’s mind, who also had seen the flit- 
ting figure and heard the hasty locking 
of the inner door. She clung to Edgar 
tremulously. 

“ Shall we venture in ?” she whispered. 

“ Do you desire not ?” he asked. “ Shall 
we go farther ? I am at your service.” 

She looked at him angrily. The cold 
politeness of his tone seemed to divorce 
them more than the rudest anger would 
have done, and she resented his resent- 
ment as an offence which might well an- 
noy her. , 

“No,” she said haughtily. “We will 
go in. You can take care of me if there 
is any danger.” 

“And if I have to take care of my- 
self?” he asked, with a certain mocking 
accent that was, to say the least of it, 
unpleasant. 

“ Your first duty is to me,” replied Ade- 
laide with intense insolence and com- 
mand. 

Besides, though a coward, she was 
dead tired at the moment; and of the 
two fatigue was stronger than fear. 

Red-armed, red-haired, touzled Jenny 


opened the door on the two battered, 
dripping strangers standing in the dusk 
without. She glowered at them as if 
they had been spirits fashioned by the 
mist, ghosts of the dead newly risen, or 
as if they had been brigands and burg- 
lars with designs on her own poor savings 
and her mistress’s fabulous hoards. 

“We have lost our way on the moun- 
tains : can you give us shelter?” asked 
Edgar in that rich voice which was one 
of his personal charms, and with the in- 
describable accent of an English gentle- 
man accustomed to command. 

“I’ll ast t’ mistress,” was Jenny’s re- 
ply, the door held cautiously ajar. 

“Jenny !” cried Miss Gryce from some 
unknown depths, “ what’s astir ? What’s 
to do at the street door ? Who are you 
chattering with ? Come away, I say. It’s 
no kind of night to be havering at the 
street door with a pack of idle vagabones. 
Come in, I say, and shut up.” 

“We have lost our way on the moor,” 
said Edgar in a louder voice. “ Cannot 
you give us shelter ?” 

And Adelaide’s smaller treble added, 
“ You must not shut the door. You must 
let us in.” 

At the sound of a woman’s voice. Miss 
Gryce — who had a heart, though it had 
to be somewhat skillfully dug for — came 
out from the kitchen, where she had been 
spending the last hour in economizing 
the fraction of a farthing, and went to 
the door to see and judge of these new- 
comers for herself. And Learn up stairs 
in her own room, standing rigid, struck 
to stone by her bedside, heard Edgar 
Harrowby and Adelaide Birkett brought 
into the house and preparations set afloat 
for their fit shelter and reception. 

Locked in her own room, she was left 
in peace. She was not of much use at 
any time when practical work was about, 
and since this strange weakness which 
had taken such possession of her she 
was even of less use than before. Miss 
Gryce therefore left her to herself, hop- 
ing that she slept. But she heard all 
that happened as clearly as if she had 
been on the spot. Her senses, sharpen- 
ed to unnatural activity, told her every- 
thing that was said and done, as if no 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM BUND AS. 


239 


such impediments as closed doors or hin- 
dering walls stood between them. She 
heard all that Edgar said by way of ex- 
planation to Miss Gryce — how that they 
had left the carriage at a certain part of 
the road to join it again by a short cut 
over the fell ; how that then the mist had 
come up and enveloped them ; and how 
that they had wandered, they knew not 
how, nor where, nor whence, till they 
had fallen on this place. She knew how 
Miss Gryce looked when she took snuff 
and their measure at the same time ; and 
how Edgar looked — bold, commanding, 
manful — with Adelaide’s fair, impassive 
face quietly accepting homage as her 
due, and care and protection as her 
right. And then she heard Adelaide’s 
feet on the stairs, and knew when she 
was ushered into the room, next her own, 
where she was to take her rest and forget 
the fatigues and fears of her adventurous 
walk. She heard her fretful complaints 
and peevish bemoanings at the shortcom- 
ings of the accommodation, with Jenny’s 
unintelligible replies, which only annoy- 
ed her more. She seemed to see as well 
as hear, and pictured the whole scene 
visibly — even to Jenny’s kneeling on the 
floor and taking by main force the soak- 
ed boots from off the swollen, blistered 
feet. Then the bewailings ceased. Ad- 
elaide, comforted by food, slept, and 
Edgar down stairs waited for a while 
before he too should take his rest and 
forget for a few hours the new chapter 
of the heart which this walk in the mist 
had opened for his instruction. It was a 
chapter that he might have learnt slow- 
ly, by quiet, unexciting passages — a thing 
to grow into, like old age or dyspepsia, or 
perhaps a thing to never learn, concealed 
as it would be by habit. But now that he 
had read, had learnt, he could not forget ; 
and the lines would be on his memory 
for ever, the text on which his life would 
be reasoned and transacted from now to 
the end of time. 

Ah, Learn Dundas had loved him ! 
Even that flattering, smooth-tongued 
Violet — venal Violet, whom he had left 
so suddenly these seven years ago, mad 
with jealousy and rage at what he be- 
lieved to be her treachery — even she 


had loved him better than this. But 
Learn, proud, shy, loyal Learn — Learn, 
so full of fire, so single hearted and so 
honorable — how she had loved him ! Oh 
that this black spot had never been on 
her young soul ! that he might have 
loved her to her life’s end as he had 
loved her for those few hours, and re- 
ceived from her for all time what she 
had given him then ! So, thinking of 
Learn, beloved if accursed and aban- 
doned, he fell into a light kind of slum- 
ber, sitting by the little window looking 
on to the broken gate and the rising 
ground beyond. 

By this time the moon had risen white 
and wan. The thin vapor that yet hung 
about the frosty air was like a silver film 
of exquisite purity and delicate power, 
giving that ethereal, almost mournful 
beauty to everything on which it fell 
which one involuntarily associates with 
past sorrows and dead loves, with spirit- 
ual forms and a life beyond and higher 
than the coarse, material life of the world. 
The house was as still as the grave. Ev- 
ery one was in bed except Edgar and 
Learn, and all were sleeping but Learn. 

Learn opened her mother’s jewel-case. 
A fancy took her to touch once more the 
withered leaves of that spray of lemon- 
plant, crumbled now to dust, which Ed- 
gar Harrowby had drawn playfully over 
her face under the cut-leaved hornbeam 
on the lawn. She took it in her hands, 
pressed it against her face, kissed it as 
if it had life and feeling to respond to 
her own : then softly unlocked her door 
and stole down stairs. 

She would see him once, just once, at 
a distance, reverently, humbly — not in- 
truding on his notice, only worshiping at 
a distance at the shrine which she had 
been too vile to keep as her own. There 
was no harm in it. She did not imagine 
that Adelaide was his wife. She took 
her presence there with him naturally, 
as that of a favorite friend and compan- 
ion ; and yet if, as she believed, only as 
a friend and companion, a pang seized 
her to think how soon he had forgotten 
her even so far. And yet, again, what 
was she that she should not be forgotten ? 
It was right and good that he had set her 


240 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM DUNDAS. 


aside so quickly. It was part of her pun- 
ishment, and she must bear it. Adelaide, 
at the least, was free from crime, and 
Adelaide loved him. Enlightened by 
her own heart, she knew now that the 
reason why the rector’s daughter had 
hated her was because she had loved 
Edgar : her hatred had meant jealousy 
of his love, not hatred of herself, Learn, 
apart from him. Yes, she loved him, 
but neither Adelaide nor any one loved 
him as did she herself, poor outcast Learn ! 
But she was a leper and he was a king, 
and the gulf between them was impas- 
sable. 

Yet she must see him just this once 
more, herself unseen : she must offer for 
one little moment the voiceless worship 
of her secret love, and then go back into 
the darkness for ever — the darkness clos- 
ing very near about her now. 

Noiseless as a falling shadow, she stole 
down stairs and came to the door of the 
sitting-room where Edgar was. It stood 
ajar. She pushed it cautiously open, and 
saw Edgar Harrowby sitting by the win- 
dow, his head on his hand, dreaming of 
her. The candle had burnt itself out : 
only the veiled moonlight streamed over 
the fell and moor, and cast a pale reflec- 
tion into the room. It showed his noble 
head resting on his hand, his face pale 
and beautiful as a tired god’s. That be- 
loved face ! What pain and pleasure 
commingled it was to see him ! She felt 
like one dead come back to earth watch- 
ing the beloved, unseen of them and un- 
suspected. He was asleep. He would 
not feel her ; he would not see nor know 
her; and, shrouded as she was in the 
shadow, he could not recognize her if 
even he should awake. She must go 
near to him and do him reverence. He 
was her god, and she was a sinner kneel- 
ing before him. She glided across the 
room, knelt for a minute by his side and 
bent her lips on the hand resting on his 
knee. 

Edgar stirred drowsily in his sleep. 
What was this ? — a touch, a perfume, a 
presence he seemed to remember ? Who 
was there ? He started up and roused 
himself. Did his eyesight mock him ? 
Surely he saw a gray figure steal through 


the open doorway in the shadow, the 
scent of lemon-plant was about him, 
and on his hand — what was this? a 
tear ? Whose ? 

But he heard and knew no more. His 
dreams had given him Learn — only his 
dreams ! Then he sighed and shook 
himself clear of the haunting thought, 
and so wearily went up stairs ; only a 
thin partition separating him, sleeping, 
from Learn Dundas, waking — Learn, 
who recognized then the fact, which 
she had not understood before, that he 
and Adelaide were man and wife. 

Forgotten, discarded! so soon indeed! 
Poor Learn ! Now for the first time she 
felt that the bitterness of her punishment 
almost equaled the shame of her guilt. 


CHAPTER XLIV. 

THE DAY OF REST. 

The church-clock sounded one, and 
the land had entered into the Sabbath 
of its rest, but there was no rest for Learn. 
She could not go to bed, for she dared 
not trust herself to sleep even if she 
could have slept, and she felt as if she 
should die of suffocation if she attempted 
to lie down. She sat in her quiet, tense 
way by the window, looking out on the 
moonlight and the frosty vapor; and 
then she turned again to her mother’s 
jewel-case and took out the spray of 
lemon-plant — now turned to dust like 
her hopes, her happiness — intending to 
destroy it for ever; for how should she 
keep a love-relic of Adelaide’s husband ? 
— and in taking it out she lifted some of 
her mother’s jewels. 

That beloved mother ! how vividly she 
remembered her, how passionately she 
loved her still ! Perhaps she loved her 
even more in that she had committed 
this crime for her, in that she had sacri- 
ficed her life here and her soul hereaf- 
ter for the false thought if the true feel- 
ing of guarding and protecting her. 
How well she remembered the day 
when she wore these coral beads, and 
that when she hung her — Leam’s — little 
neck and arms with these strings of 
pearls ! She heard her say again when 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM BUND AS. 


241 


her father gave her these golden coins, 
and when her husband — that false-heart- 
ed Sebastian, mockery of a saint — had 
bought, those rubies and those sapphires. 
For an hour and more Learn handled 
these jewels to chase away the conscious- 
ness of Edgar in memories of her moth- 
er, but at last the effort became more 
than she could bear, and the attempt 
died out in a sob. As she was putting 
away the sapphires she inadvertently 
touched the secret spring — which had 
got strained and weakened, and of the 
existence of which she had hitherto been 
ignorant — and thus dropped the division 
which hid the back of the case from the 
ordinary looker-in. There fell forward, 
with the division, a large and heavy 
green velvet pocket-book, with the ini- 
tials V. E. H. embroidered in raised 
gold-work on the cover. 

Surprised, she opened the book and 
came upon letters written in Edgar’s 
handwriting to a certain “beloved Vio- 
let’’ — a certain Mrs. Harrington whom 
he called “love,’’ and “life,’’ and “dar- 
ling wife,’’ and “best beloved;’’ to a 
photograph of himself inscribed to his 
“darling Violet;’’ to a photograph of 
madame — not in weeds — subscribed also 
“darling Violet;’’ to one of himself and 
madame in a confiding attitude together; 
and to one of Fina, when she was about 
five months old, with “ For her father, 
Edgar Harrowby,’’ in madame’s hand- 
writing. She read the first letters half 
bewildered, scarcely understanding the 
full meaning of her discovery, not tak- 
ing in what she read, but seeming to 
herself to be reading some horrible 
nightmare story. Then by slow de- 
grees the truth came to her, burning 
itself into her brain, mounting in crim- 
son to her cheeks — shame, horror, de- 
spair, all battling in her poor heart to- 
gether as she grew to a clear under- 
standing of madame’s shameful secret 
and Edgar’s hidden life. 

And she ! She had been really noth- 
ing to him — only a plaything, an occa- 
sion like the rest. First madame, then 
herself, now Adelaide ! Is this the kind 
of thing men call love ? It would seem 
so, judging from him and from her own 
16 


father. But it was not what Learn, in 
the narrow limits of her ignorant purity, 
cared to dignify by that name. Love 
was something single, true and pure ; 
and this — She had no word by which 
to call it. Neither her experience nor her 
vocabulary compassed the life and sen- 
timents of such a man as Edgar Har- 
rowby ; nor could she understand how, 
with such a life, such sentiments, could 
exist any nobleness or manly worth. 
How could it have been ? He, so good 
and great as he always seemed ! — how 
could he have lived this hideous life of 
falsehood and treachery and deceit, pre- 
tending love now here, now there, first 
to one and then to another — pretending 
what he^ could not possibly feel ? 

These swift changes, these facile in- 
constancies, to a girl like Learn, so te- 
nacious and single-hearted, were inex- 
piable crimes, and in such a man as to 
her imagination Edgar Harrowby was — 
knightly hero, noble saint, a very demi- 
god — utterly incomprehensible. Edgai 
when she had confessed her crime to 
him had not felt more instinctively re- 
volted than she did now when she dis- 
covered the reality of his career and laid 
bare his infidelities. Her brain seemed 
on fire, her heart was broken. The only 
thought possessing her was how to es- 
cape from the house where he was sleep- 
ing with his wife, not six feet from where 
she stood. She felt it a kind of dishonor 
to breathe the same air as himself. She 
knew too much to stay under the same 
roof with him, even as one apart, un- 
known and dead. 

But, bad as he was, she loved him, 
and she would destroy this record of his 
guilt. No one but herself should ever 
know how deeply he had sinned. She 
would take that pocket-book far out on 
the fell, and bury it deep among the 
heather where man should never find it, 
and thus keep his secret safe and his 
name still honored. It was the last thing 
that she could do for him. She had loved 
him : for that love’s sake she had sacri- 
ficed herself, and to keep his honor un- 
touched had renounced him ; and now 
she would shield him from discovery, and 
bury the evidence of his shame and sin 


242 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


out of the sight and ken of all till the 
day of judgment should reveal it. Poor 
Learn ! what grief and what delusion her 
two great loves had brought her ! 

The house was still buried in sleep. 
Once she heard Adelaide move uneasily 
on her pillow and moan, and once Edgar 
woke up with a start and a deep-drawn 
breath, like a man dreaming of pain. 
But these sounds soon dropped into 
absolute quiet, and the house fell again 
into the stillness of a tomb. The silver 
mist still hung like a veil between earth 
and sky, and the world without was as 
noiseless as the world within. For the 
second time Learn stole softly down the 
stairs, undid the bolts and bars, and pass- 
ed out into the silence, the cold mist and 
the dim distance. 

She did not know where she went nor 
when she meant to stop. She had but 
one feeling, to escape — but one design, 
to hide for ever the evidence of Edgar’s 
crime. So she went on, stumbling wild- 
ly up the rough fell-road, when she halt- 
ed and staggered and fell. 

The morning broke soft and gray in a 
peaceful but not brilliant nor jocund Sab- 
bath — a day which seemed like the sub- 
dued and tender echQ.of yesterday’s bit- 
terness of sorrow, bringing rest if not 
joy, and where, if there were no smiles, 
there were no tears. Haunted by his 
dreams, which had given him Learn al- 
ways, Learn only, Edgar rose early and 
wandered about the place, taking the 
downward village-way ; but save their 
own carriage standing by the door of the 
Blucher he saw nothing of any interest to 
him. He was glad, however, to see the 
carriage, so that they could leave their 
homely shelter and push on to Carlisle. 
He was ill at ease here. Ah, should he 
ever be more content? Had not he too 
parted with his summer, his sunshine, 
his happiness, and come into the gray 
gloom of eternal sorrow ? 

When he went back to the house he 
found Adelaide in deep distress about her 
flounces, torn, muddy, destroyed. Her 
soul lived in her wardrobe, dress was 
her life, and the destruction of her pretty 
traveling-gown was to her an infliction 


quite as terrible in its own way as the 
destruction to Learn of her ideal, or as 
had been to Edgar the discovery of her 
guilt. How could she wear such a rag 
as this ? she said, weeping, when her hus- 
band entered her room. What a miser- 
able journey they had had ! what a day it 
had been altogether ! And this dreadful 
house, this room ! Look at the dirty 
windows, thick with dust and cobwebs 
— they could not have been cleaned for 
a year — the soiled curtains, the patched 
uncleanly counterpane ; and, weeping 
afresh, her horrible gown. To Adelaide, 
speckless, spotless Adelaide, dirt and dis- 
order were crimes in those about her : 
when they touched herself they were de- 
gradation so deep as to be on a level with 
immorality. 

Edgar listened to her lamentations 
with a man’s wonder at a woman’s per- 
sonal woes; then quietly told her that 
he had sent for the carriage, which had 
put up at the village, and that she would 
soon have her maid and her traveling 
trunk, and so be out of her millinery 
misery. This so far consoled her that 
she left off weeping, though she still be- 
wailed herself, and held that she had 
been specially ill used of him and fate : 
she had her list of grievances off by 
heart, and she was minded that Edgar 
should learn to the full what she had 
suffered, and in that learning perhaps 
forget what she had inflicted. 

It was strange how her comparative- 
ly small discomforts and not surprising 
peevishness jarred on her husband to- 
day. At one time he would have laugh- 
ed, and comforted her with a man’s good- 
humored superiority to such minor mat- 
ters as lace and muslin. Perhaps he 
would have liked her all the better for 
her care of her person : it was so far flat- 
tering to him. But to-day her petulance 
wore another aspect altogether, and set 
him at odds with her more than before. 
It was like the intrusion of the petty mis- 
eries and mean annoyances of daily life 
into the solemn story of a tragedy, the 
tender strains of a threnody ; as indeed 
it was, too truly. 

Still perplexed at that vision of last 
night, and haunted by a mad idea which 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


243 


he could not dominate — feeling the pres- 
ence of Learn, though he knew that she 
was not here, could not possibly by any 
jugglery of events, as he believed, be 
here — Edgar asked their uncouth hostess 
carelessly at their homely breakfast if she 
had any one living with her beside the 
servant ? 

“Only a sort of a niece,” said Keziah 
— “a kind of adopted daughter of my 
brother Emmanuel.” 

“ Emmanuel ! That is an unusual 
name,” said Edgar. 

“Ay, it’s not a common sort, I reck- 
on,” she said. “Nor is our surname: 
Emmanuel Gryce isn’t a name as is pick- 
ed up at every street-corner.” She laugh- 
ed as she spoke. Like most Northerners, 

}■ she had a large amount of family pride. 

Edgar felt his face grow pale. “ Does 
your brother Emmanuel Gryce live at 
North Aston ?” he asked. 

“Ay, that’s where he is just now, though 
he’s a sad, rambling sort of a body, and 
never bides long anywhere. But that’s 
his home just now. Do you happen to 
know him 

“ Yes,” said Edgar. “ We live at North 
Aston, my wife and 1. And your niece, 
his adopted daughter — is her name Gryce 
too ?” 

“ No, she’s one Leonora Darley,” said 
Keziah, suspecting nothing. “ I don’t 
know where he fished her up, nor who 
are her forebears, but that’s the name 
she goes by.” 

“ Is she in the house ?” he asked, look- 
ing down on his plate, not daring to trust 
his eyes, scarcely able to command his 
voice ; Adelaide’s cold blue eyes looking, 
at him half in surprise, half in suspicion. 

“Yes, she is in the house sure enough, 
abed,” answered Keziah. “She is only 
in bad health, isn’t the poor lass, and 
when she’s a mind to sleep we let her. 
She’s not oft so late as this, and I’ll be 
rousing her by and by.” 

“ What is the matter with her health ?” 
he asked. 

“ Eh, who knows ! Your bits of lasses 
are always ailing,” said Keziah. “May- 
hap some love-trouble — most like. She’s 
close, though, and has not told me aught.” 

“You are wonderfully inquisitive about 


this young lady,” said Adelaide with a 
forced laugh. “ What interest can a per- 
fect stranger have for you ?” 

But she too felt uneasy. It was not 
that she formulated Learn distinctly : 
nevertheless, there was a dim kind of 
fear, a nameless suspicion, and the im- 
age of Learn like a shadow in the back- 
ground. She was not dead ; this dread- 
ful woman was the sister of that strange 
Mr. Gryce of Lionnet ; and there was an 
adopted daughter of evidently unknown 
antecedents in bad health living with her 
and invisible. So far she could piece to- 
gether the fragments of the mystery, and 
so far she was uneasy. How she longed 
to get away from this place ! She had felt 
there was danger in it when she passed 
through the gates and stood by the door. 
Would the carriage never come : Should 
they never be able to escape ? 

No more, however, was said or done. 
Edgar held his peace. Being a man, a 
woman’s sneer could control him, and 
the carriage, which had stopped at Monk 
Grange overnight, as we know, soon af- 
ter this came up to take them on their 
journey. To Adelaide’s unspeakable re- 
lief, they got in without more being said of 
Miss Leonora Darley, Mr. Gryce’s adopt- 
ed daughter ; and they set off, leaving 
Miss Gryce so much impressed by their 
grandeur, and touzled Jenny so much 
taken up by their liberality, as to cause 
both to forget poor Leam’s continued ab- 
sence, strange as it was to her habits. 

But Edgar regretted that they went 
without seeing this adopted niece. It 
would have set his mind at rest if he 
had seen her. Now the moonlight vision 
that had come to him between sleeping 
and waking, that scent of lemon-plant, 
that tear on his hand, would ever remain 
a mystery, an undying fear and a lifelong 
pain. 

They wound slowly up the rough, steep 
fell -side road, and presently Edgar, to 
lighten the load and also to free himself 
from Adelaide’s presence for a time, got 
out to walk up the hill, and soon drew 
far ahead of the lumbering carriage. 
As he walked on he saw at a distance 
something gray by the wayside. Backed 
by the russet-brown of the dying bracken 


244 


THE ATONEMENT OF TEAM FUND AS. 


and the gold of the late gorse, that some- 
thing gray came out in strange distinct- 
ness. Was it a stone jutting out into 
the roadway ? No, it was not a stone : it 
looked more like a human figure than a 
rock. 

He quickened his pace, walking rapid- 
ly. The village bells were chiming up 
from the church at the fell -foot, calling 
the weary workers to the Sabbath Day 
devot.ons, the peaceful service of the 
day of rest ; the scattered sheep on the 
fell-side were bleating to each other, the 
faithful collies barking and the distant 
cattle lowing. But all these sounds were 
far off and subdued, mere echoes of the 
life afar : near at hand it was absolute 
stillness — a stillness in fit accord with 
the sunless sky and the gray, dim, som- 
bre day. Edgar walked fast, ever faster, 
and now had distanced the carriage by 
half a mile or more. He came nearer, 
nearer to the figure lying on the road, 
and now so near that he knew it to be 
a woman, young, slight, with dark hair — 
a woman of condition, not a tramp nor a 
peasant. 

A little child from a hind’s hut near 
stood beside that prostrate figure. The 
freshening wind blew back the sunny 
curls from the wondering rosy face and 
drove into a little cloud the clean white 
Sunday frock with the bits of blue about 
the arms to mark the mother’s loving 
pride in her child. Her dimpled hands 
were full of withered fern and dying 
heather, of ox-eye daisies and golden- 
headed ragwort. She had scattered 
handfuls over the woman lying asleep 
there by the wayside, but now she was 
standing wondering why she laid so still, 
and did not awake when she was called. 

Edgar, breathless, heart-struck, know- 
ing full well what was before him, strode 
up to the sleeping woman. He knelt on 
one knee and gently lifted the hidden 
face, the helpless body, pressing to his 
bosom tenderly, reverently, the dear 
head of his dead love. As he moved 
the body he drew her hand from the 
heather where it had been thrust, and 
took from it, clutched tight and rigid 
with death, the green velvet pocket- 
book which he had given seven years 


ago to Violet Cray, when they lived in 
St. John’s Wood under the name of 
Harrington. 

He took it from her hand and con- 
cealed it in his own breast, hiding it just 
in* time from Adelaide, coming up in the 
carriage. 

She stopped and got out to find him 
thus — kneeling on one knee, supporting 
the dead body of Learn Dundas, holding 
to his breast the pale dead face wet with 
his passionate tears, unresponsive to his 
despairing caresses. 

Adelaide laid her hand lightly on his 
shoulder. “Is this manly?’’ she said in 
a cold voice. “You knew that she was 
here.’’ 

“Do not speak of her,’’ he answered 
bitterly, turning away his head. ‘She 
loved me, and she is dead.’’ 

“Dead!’’ she echoed, as much dis- 
pleasure as natural horror in her voice. 

It was an offence to one like Adelaide 
that the girl whom she had always hated, 
but who had been in a sense her equal 
and companion, should have died with 
this tragic unconventionality — a poor lost 
creature lying by the wayside like one 
of the waifs of the world for whom is 
neither love nor care, neither respect- 
ability nor decency. When people of 
Leam’s condition die, they should die in 
their beds, decently as befits the rational 
and well-conducted, not out on a wild 
fell-top, drenched with the mists of night 
and stiffened stark with its frosts. She 
made a movement as if she would have 
spoken, but Edgar, who read her heart, 
thrust her almost savagely aside. “Si- 
lence!” he said. “You shall not blas- 
pheme her. She was true and faithful, 
and if she sinned she has suffered, and 
will be forgiven. She loved me, but she 
lies here, and — you are my wife !” 

He bent his head and again kissed the 
pale face on his breast, then lifted her rev- 
erently to place her in the carria'ge. 

As he stood up with his pitiful burden 
the church-bells ceased ringing, and Al- 
ick, in his place, began the Morning Ser- 
vice with these words : 

“ The sacrifices of God are a broken 
spirit ; a broken and a contrite heart, O 
God, Thou wilt not despise.” 












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